Emacs OSX

Features

• Tested on Mac OSX Big Sur and Catalina
• Works with yabai tiling window manager
• Comes with 4 variants (with/without native-compilation, and with/without tiling support)
• Cached builds, updated from source every 24 hours

There are 4 variants

emacsOsx

master emacs. Fresh out of https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs

emacsOsxNative

master emacs, with native compilation

emacsOsxTile

emacsOsx with tiling support (may not work with posframe/childframe)

emacsOsxNativeTile

emacsOsxNative with tiling support (may not work with posframe/childframe)

Installation

Install Nix and optionally nix-darwin

No Nix knowledge required, and you do NOT need nix-darwin for this to work. Nix Darwin allows installation to /Applications folder but you could also symlink from ~/.nix-profile/Applications.

Visit this link if you haven't installed Nix already. https://nixos.org/guides/install-nix.html

Install to nix-store

# Install from cachix binaries
nix-env -iA cachix -f https://cachix.org/api/v1/install
cachix use nequissimus

# `emacsOsxNative` can be substituted with any variant (mentioned above)
nix-env -iA emacsOsxNative -f https://github.com/nequissimus/emacs-osx/archive/refs/tags/built.tar.gz

Copy to /Applications

Not required if you are using nix-darwin.

sudo rm -rf /Applications/Emacs.app
sudo cp -rL ~/.nix-profile/Applications/Emacs.app /Applications

Motivation

• Replicate Emacs Overlay to OSX/darwin environment
• Allow overrides of patches
• Last but not least, for my own learning and use
• And in future (my own custom icons)

Patches

More patches can be found below:

• daviderestivo's emacs-head
• Emacs plus
• Emacs overlay

Note that this uses --with-ns (nextstep) and patches from "Mac Port" (see here) version will likely not work.

References

• https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-unstable/pkgs/applications/editors/emacs/generic.nix
• https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay
• https://european-lisp-symposium.org/static/2020/corallo-nassi-manca-slides.pdf
• https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.02504.pdf
• https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Building-Emacs.html

Inspired By

Gccemacs by twlz0ne

CI configuration (Github Action)

Refer https://docs.github.com/en/actions/reference/workflow-syntax-for-github-actions#jobsjob_idruns-on