Mac – Uninstalling Emacs on OS X (Snow Leopard)

emacsosx-snow-leoparduninstall

I have several versions of Emacs installed in my system, some of which do not work, and I would like to get rid of all but one (or maybe all of them and then start from scratch again). I tried looking for instructions on how to uninstall Emacs and, suspiciously enough, didn't find any. So the question is, how do I uninstall Emacs?

More background info: I have macports installed, but didn't install Emacs through there; I compiled it from source (several times). For that I've used curl and cvs at different times to get the sources. I also tried with the binary from the emacs-for-mac-os-x site, but it won't let me copy it, after extracting it, to the Applications folder. Aquamacs has not been an option and I don't mind keeping it that way.

Any and all help is appreciated!

Best Answer

Depending on how your versions of emacs were built, there are two different procedures.

If you built an OS X app (Emacs.app), all you should need to do is drag the app to the trash. All of emacs' support files are contained withing the app

If you just have an emacs binary sitting around, you need to delete that and the corresponding support files. For instance, the emacs binary that comes with OS X is in /usr/bin/emacs, and its support files are in /usr/share/emacs. The contents of the second directory should contain subdirs named site-lisp and named after version numbers (e.g., 22.1). If you want to be complete, you might want to search your disk for directories named site-lisp to make sure you found everything.

As a side note, the version of emacs that is available through MacPorts now seems to be pretty good. I've been using it for a while, and haven't had any major issues.

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