May 17, 2005

Oh, look, emacs broke again!

Who'dve thunk it?

Yeah, the OS X 10.4.1 upgrade broke emacs. Or, rather, to put the blame in the right place, the 'clever' tricks that emacs plays to get itself going break with depressing regularity when anything inside the OS shifts around. (Part of the build process actually core-dumps a running emacs and then fixes up the core file to be an executable, which is clever but somewhat fragile on some OSes, including OS X)

It's a pity I can't stand the vi-alikes. This has gotten kinda old.

Posted by Dan at May 17, 2005 10:18 AM
Comments

It may or may not be a good idea.. but if you don't "reboot" emacs too often, you could try to just use the raw, undumped emacs? It will have a lot longer startup time, tho...

Still, I bet it took longer to write this post than to redump Emacs, did it? :-)

--chris2

Posted by: chneukirchen at May 17, 2005 12:18 PM

It took a little longer to relink emacs than it did to write the blog post, but that wasn't exactly the point, and I'm sort of an unusual case -- not too many people have a fully built copy of the emacs source tree kicking around on their hard drive.

Most of the folks using Emacs on OS X, including me normally, use one of the prebuilt versions. If I hadn't had a copy of the source handy I would've been out of luck until I could scare one up. A pain for me (no CVS from the wireless DMZ here) and for people who just use emacs rather than actually build emacs (who also might not have gcc installed) it'd be something of a showstopper. Switching to textedit for a few days while waiting for someone else to go rebuild emacs could be described as... sub-optimal.

Posted by: Dan at May 17, 2005 01:28 PM

Is there anything that you'd really miss from the console version? Do you use your mouse for coding? It sounds just wrong, but perhaps using emacs in the terminal is an ok compromise.

I used (and loved) emacs for 5 or 6 six years (on FreeBSD) but then found my wrists and hands hurt when I started using it on Mac keyboards. I tried out Vim, cursed for about a week at how lame it did things (compared to the ironic simplicity of elisp) but my hands stopped hurting and now there's no way I'd switch back. Vim (but not other vi-alikes) is actually brilliant to use.

Posted by: Toby at May 17, 2005 08:42 PM

Yeah, I do make use of the mouse and multiple windows when I use emacs, and switching back to using it in a terminal window's always a really big pain in the neck. (I do it anyway when I need to work on remote machines, but that doesn't mean I like it as much :) I've been using it in window mode (first under X11 and now on OS X) for something going on a decade now, and it's something I've just gotten used to. It's even finally displaced the EDT finger macros in my brain.

I could, I suppose, get used to vim, but I really dislike modal editors (hated xedit when I had to use it, too) and if I can avoid 'em I will. (I know enough of vi to edit simple CVS commit messages and that's it. Yeah, I could learn it, but at this point I think I'd take the effort it'd require and learn to play the piano instead, or something else equally useful and non-computerish.

Posted by: Dan at May 18, 2005 09:06 AM