Mac – How to get a “modern” emacs that runs in a terminal on os x lion

emacssshterminal

I just installed Prompt on my iPad so I could possiby do some real work on my iMac via ssh. so far Mutt and Vim and emacs seemto work responsively enough for me. I've made a few tries at emacs before, but am essentially relearning it.

Of course the emacs that comes with Lion is 22.1.1. I installed the current emacs cocoa on my iMac, but it doesn't run in a terminal.

Is there a terminal version of 24 precompiled for OS X? Or is compiling it straightforward? So far I've had no need for Macports or Homebrew, and would prefer not to use them.

Best Answer

As far as I know, every emacs under the sun can run in a terminal:

/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs -nw

Change the path, of course, if your emacs resides elsewhere. If this is too long to type, even with tab completion, you can create a symlink to the Emacs executable, or make an alias for your shell.

Look to http://emacsformacosx.com/ for a precompiled modern Emacs for OS X.

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MacOS – ssh-under-cron stops working in OS X 10.7 Lion

For anyone who ends up on this page, I realized I should post the answer:

Using launchd instead of cron does indeed fix the authorization problem. Your user launchd jobs (which run only when you are logged in) correctly use the SSH agent information that was unlocked via your keychain as part of login (as part of standard OS X key management, no other software required).

To minimize my interactions with launchd, I created a single launchd job that calls a bash script. In this way I can simply edit the script without dealing with launchd.

Here's the launchd file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
  <string>com.mycron.hourly</string>

  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
  <array>
    <string>/Users/john/bin/cron.hourly</string>
  </array>

  <key>Nice</key>
  <integer>1</integer>

  <key>StartInterval</key>
  <integer>3600</integer> <!-- start every X seconds -->

  <key>RunAtLoad</key>
  <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

I saved the file to ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.mycron.hourly.plist, and then loaded it with:

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.mycron.hourly.plist

Once loaded, it will run right away and then again every 60 minutes.

If you follow the same procedure, you'll want to change the `ProgramArguments' string with the right path to your script.

MacOS – Sluggish cursor movement in emacs in Lion Terminal

Are you using a translucent terminal window appearance? Terminal now supports window background blur in addition to translucency, and existing settings profiles default to 20% blur (except Pro, which uses 0%). If you have a large terminal window and/or slower hardware, you may notice some slow down when moving around in emacs (compared to vim, emacs is noticeably inefficient about updating the display when moving the cursor around and redraws a lot, which requires redrawing the background).

Try selecting a different profile or edit the profile to disable blur:

Terminal > Preferences > Settings > [profile] > Window > Background > Color

Best Answer

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MacOS – ssh-under-cron stops working in OS X 10.7 Lion

MacOS – Sluggish cursor movement in emacs in Lion Terminal

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