Re: [avr-chat] Mac AVR development

[Matthew MacClary]

On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 12:20 PM, Joerg Wunsch <address@hidden> wrote:
> Curious question from a non-MacOS but Emacs user: why -nw?  Is the
> windowing version not supported?  (I use emacs -nw when being logged
> into a remote side through ssh, but would always prefer the graphical
> front-end otherwise.)

There are two parts to this answer first: I seem to remember that at
least on older versions of MacOS emacs was included, but the GUI
didn't run. Also if the OP needed to install emacs then I would put
the chances of success for getting the console version running at 98%
and changes for gui version at 80% just because of added complexity
from toolkit and X server version compatibility and pre-requisites.

Second part of the answer is that I never used the Emacs GUI. It does
work fine and has many innovative features. However, I learned emacs
mostly from the console and started aliasing emacs to 'emacs -nw'
years ago so that I wouldn't accidentally try to start up a remote X
gui.

I find the console emacs to be slightly lower latency and it works on
every platform I have tried it on with minimal configuration and no X
server to setup. For example you can run emacs -nw under Cygwin fast
and easy, but running an X server is slower and less reliable. Since I
never touch the mouse when editing text, I don't miss any mouse
related GUI features. Also it is very fast to type ^Z to get to the
console and do other tasks or switch to a backgrounded emacs session
with a different working directory related to a completely different
project.

A guess a final point is that for a Mac user the command line editor
might look cool and unixy, but the emacs GUI might just look ugly.
(Maybe there is a nice carbon GUI available now for Mac I wouldn't
know.)

Probably more info than you wanted...

-Matt