To dotemacs: Jump in a lake. Signed, Aquamacs

November 9, 2006 11:53 AM

Emacs under OS X: I installed Aquamacs a while ago, and my dotemacs file received a "thumping" royale. What should I do?

Long time Linux user, first time OS X'er here. Insanely passionate fan of Emacs, which I use strickly as a text editor, after activating refill and longlines mode.

Post-Aquamacs install, I renamed my dotemacs file to Preferences.el, moving it into the appropriate directory tree (as advised to by Aquamacs). I checked and rechecked permissions and ownership, of course.

Aquamacs acknowledged my keybindings, but stomped all over most of my other settings, like foreground and background, and also my "set coding system for saving this buffer" command, which I need for multibyte characters.

I recouped several of these by configuring Aquamacs through its menu system (which saves to a file called customizations.el). Even so, despite clicking on "save options," several menu selections aren't saved.

Is there anyway to tweak Aquamacs so I can rely solely on dotemacs (aka Preferences.el), ignoring the menu hierarchy for the time being? Failing that, can dotemacs-esque commands be edited into customizations.el? Has anybody had difficulties with the Aquamacs installs and configuration, indicating that these might be bugs?

And, since we're on the Linux-to-OS X transition topic. Anybody figured out how to configure sloppy focus or focus-follows-mouse for OS X? (Google's responses to my queries are all a year or two old).

posted by Gordion Knott to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Don't know about emacs, but as to your mouse focus question, run:

defaults write com.apple.x11 wm_ffm true

This only works in X11 apps. I don't know of a way in regular OSX apps.
posted by sbutler at 12:11 PM on November 9, 2006

I use aqua emacs and for me its as simple as putting my .emacs and associated emacs dir (which loads up stuff from .emacs) in my home dir. None of this messing around with Preferences.el

Don't think the focus follows mouse thing is possible for normal apps, but it is possible in x11 and in terminal.
posted by singingfish at 2:22 PM on November 9, 2006

I use a Mac emacs port, but not aquaemacs. I use Carbon emacs, available here.

Now, I don't have a very large .emacs file, but what I do have works with carbon emacs. I haven't seen any oddball behaviors related to different .el files, and I didn't have to do anything with a Preferences.el file to have my .emacs file just work.

I also have not had trouble with carbon emacs and cyrillic text.

I can't help you with mouse configurations, but there are ways to change the key bindings in Mac OS X in general to make them more like Unix. See this page and other links therein.
posted by cotterpin at 2:25 PM on November 9, 2006

The focus follows mouse is possible with third party software. Codetek's VirtualDesktop did it but I don't know how it is with Intel Macs and more recent OS Xs in general, and I was coincidentally pointed towards Mondomouse earlier today on a newsgroup.
posted by edd at 2:50 PM on November 9, 2006