Transitioning to GUI'd Emacs on macOS

22 Jul 2020

I went on an adventure today. I left behind the stable comforts of the terminal and compiled bleeding-edge Emacs that uses a native window system.

This is a big deal for me. As long as I can remember, I’ve used Emacs from within a terminal. I’ve decided to give the GUI’d Emacs a whirl.

My Journey #

I’m running macOS Catalina (10.15.5). Originally I tried using the pre-built packages via brew (brew cask install emacs) and those available at Emacs for Mac OS X. However, all these pre-built binaries crashed on Catalina. I guess it’s a problem with Catalina. 🙄

Switching from Helm to Ivy

13 Dec 2019

Yet again, I’ve tweaked my emacs configuration. The big change this time is switching to Ivy from Helm.

I’d like to say right off the bat that Helm is a great tool. I used it for several months and enjoyed it. Once thing that I love about helm is how discoverable it makes commands and functions. helm also got me into using bookmarks. I don’t keep many bookmarks; I tend to collect a few when working on a multi-file project long-term. The bookmark that I use most consistently is to my .emacs file; these days I’m fiddling constantly with my settings.