Aquamacs Emacs 1.0 Released Today
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Aquamacs Emacs 1.0 was
released today (following on the heels of the recent release of
GNU Emacs 22). I've been using Aquamacs on my Mac for a few
years now and really like it. It's an excellent combination of
standard Emacs with some extra Mac-specific functionality (which you
can choose to either turn on or off depending on your own personal
preferences). There is a
feature matrix available which provides a high-level summary of
how Aquamacs compares to both standard GNU Emacs as well as a couple
of other Mac-specific editors. The following screen shot isn't from my
Mac but it gives a good idea of the look-and-feel of Aquamacs Emacs:
Here's the
official announcement:
Aquamacs Emacs 1.0Congratulations to David Reitter and all the other developers who worked on both GNU Emacs and Aquamacs Emacs.
http://aquamacs.org
After more than two years of development, the Aquamacs Project has now released version 1.0, which features enhanced usability.
Aquamacs is a Mac-friendly variant of the widely-used editor Emacs. It is a versatile, fast and mature editor for source code, web pages, typesetting documents and all other forms of text. Emacs is a text editor of legendary flexibility and has made millions of programmers and writers very productive. Numerous packages allow users to extent its functionality.
Aquamacs is adapted to the Mac's "Aqua" user interface. That means more than just the fact that this version of Emacs runs as a standard OS X application. But earlier versions of Emacs also had an enormously complex user interface. That is different in Aquamacs, which behaves the way Mac users expect. Aquamacs looks good and integrates well with other applications on the Mac. Normal OS X keyboard commands are offered along with the extended Emacs ones. No complicated installation is needed. Yet it's still a real GNU Emacs with all the ergonomy and extensibility that this world-class editor is famous for.
Aquamacs 1.0 includes the following features:Founded and maintained by the father of Free Software, Richard M. Stallman, GNU Emacs has a long history that began some thirty years ago. He is helped by a team of volunteers, some of which have worked hard to bring Emacs to the Mac. Aquamacs Emacs is a spin-off distribution maintained by David Reitter and his team of enthusiastic users, Mac lovers and Emacs experts.
- A comprehensive text editing environment, with specialized support for nearly every computer language (C/C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, Java, AppleScript, Lisp, etc.) and text/markup format (HTML, XML, LaTeX, etc.)
- New Mac-style icons, menus and keyboard shortcuts for greater ease- of-use.
- Cursor, mouse and window behavior as is common on the Mac.
- Support for unicode encodings and various, in particular: Asian, input methods.
- Comprehensive user documentation in standard Apple Help format.
- Based on GNU Emacs 22, the latest release of Emacs from the GNU project.
Aquamacs 1.0 is Free Software and open-source. It is a universal binary, supporting both PPC and Intel, and requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 to run. Downloads and more information are available at http:// aquamacs.org.
