Aquamacs Emacs 1.8a

Aquamacs Emacs 1.8a is a powerful tool which is designed to provide you with a Mac-like distribution of the powerful Emacs text editor. It looks and behaves like a Mac program - even though it's still GNU Emacs with all the extensibility that millions have come to appreciate.

Emacs is a text editor of legendary power and configurability, but it also has an enormously complex interface. Aquamacs tames the Emacs tiger: you get Apple shortcuts (in addition to the Emacs ones), nice fonts, one file per window (if wanted), international input methods, Apple Help manuals and more. Aquamacs comes with a range of modes for various markup and programming languages: HTML, C/C , Java, Python, Perl, AppleScript, Tcl, XML, R (S)... These modes have extra functions for the languages, including excellent syntax highlighting. You can even use Aquamacs to read news and e-mail, just like any Emacs.

Aquamacs is better. It supports the standard Mac user interface that you've come to love. For instance, in addition to traditional Emacs shortcuts like C-x C-f (open a new file), Aquamacs understands Command-O.

Aquamacs behaves like a modern application on Mac (or Windows) when it comes to selecting, copying, pasting texts within Aquamacs or in between applications. Aquamacs offers nice, smooth fonts. Asian input methods work. It's easy to install and runs out-of-the box with no configuration. And all is built on GNU Emacs, so you can use your favorite Emacs packages!

Major Features:

1. Fonts just work, right from the menu: The Mac-standard font (Lucida Grande) is the default for editing text, and the mono-spaced Monaco is used to other modes. These fonts are nicely rendered with antialiasing. Aquamacs offers a range of proportional and mono-spaced fonts to choose from.
   
2. Aquamacs Emacs has a standard Mac menu with entries where you would expect them, and recently used files are available from the File menu.
   
3. Aquamacs Emacs gives you all the standard Mac shortcuts like Apple-S, Apple-C, Apple-V - everything that you're used to.
   
4. Aquamacs Emacs can organize the files that you're editing in tabs. This preserves screen space but allows you to keep track of all those open files easily. You've probably seen the tabs in Safari, Firefox or the OS X Terminal program.
   
5. Aquamacs Emacs can open a normal OS X window for each file that is opened - Emacs experts call such windows frames. Finally, Aquamacs Emacs makes use of the capabilities of windows on modern graphical user interfaces. This is configurable with a mouse-click - of course, You can switch between the windows (frames) with the "Buffers"  menu.
   
6. Perfect Team-play. Clipboard operations interoperate with other Mac apps. In Aquamacs Emacs, if you mark a chunk of text, it will NOT be automatically copied into the clipboard. Just like in any Mac  program, you can copy with the Apple-C command, and then replace  another region by selecting it and hitting Apple-V (Paste).
   
7. Support for Asian languages. In addition to the input methods provided by any current Emacs for OS X, the Aquamacs Multilingual Environment defines configuration settings for Chinese, Japanese and Korean on top of the standard Mule. A font-package is included (not preactivated).
   
8. Printing just works the way you expect it to - with a preview and through the normal printing infrastructure.
   
9. Meta Key Management: since Emacs uses an extra modifier key that is not on your keyboard, Aquamacs allows you to use the Option key (or others with configuration). But even then you won't lose the ability to input characters such as [ or with the most common non-English keyboard layouts.
   
10. Frame Appearance Themes: You can define fonts and colors as defaults for a given editing mode. That means that you can have customized designs for different types of files you're editing. For example, you can easily distinguish LaTeX files on the screen by their beige background color, if you pick a color theme for the a latex window and select "use current theme for latex-mode".
    
11. A number of little extensions specific to the Mac are contained - they're small details that make your life easier. For example, there is a "Show (file) in Finder" function, or another one to open new files in one of many popular modes. When you double-click a file written in Aquamacs, it'll open in Aquamacs (thanks to Creator meta-information in files). You get a menu with recently edited files without any configuration. Of course, it supports OS X functionality such as the little button in the upper right corner of windows that lets you switch the local tool-bar on and off!
    
12. It's a distribution that comes with the latest goodies pre-installed so you can simply use them and get on with your life. No installation, no setup needed. Here's what's included: AUCTeX for comfortable LaTeX editing, ESS (Emacs speaks Statistics) as an interface to statistics applications such as R, SPLUS etc., nXML for comfortable XML editing. Other, smaller, packages provide support for a range of programming languages and other formalisms. Point-and-Click installers can be downloaded for the high-quality Java and Lisp support with JDEE and SLIME, respectively.
    
13. Aquamacs Emacs remains extensible, so you can use special syntax coloring setups or enjoy embedded CVS support, a HTML markup menu and the like. Aquamacs is compatible with GNU Emacs.
    
14. Aquamacs Emacs offers a dedicated manual plus the good old Emacs manual directly via Apple Help environment - you can search both of them quickly with Spotlight and read the documentation comfortably.
    
15. Great Support. A community around Aquamacs Emacs (and a larger one around Emacs!) will help you out when you don't know how to do X. Just write to the mailing list (but check the manuals first!)

Enhancements:

• Tabs are now directly accessible using keys A-M-1,2,3...9,0 (normally: Command-Option-1,2,3...9,0). The number of each tabs is marked. For configuration, see the new customization variable `tabbar-show-key-bindings' and the function `tabbar-define-access-keys'. For instance, use (tabbar-define-access-keys '(alt)) in your Preferences.el file to use Command-1,2,3.. bindings.
  
• Aquamacs now asks for confirmation when printing is requested via A-p. This helps avoid long waits for rendering with large buffers when A-p is pressed by mistake.
  
• On systems with faulty LaTeX installations, Aquamacs will now do a better job at choosing the right TeXLive (or legacy teTeX) binaries.
  
• When scrolling back and forth page-wise, the point will now end up in its previous position.
  
• Command-, can now be re-bound via the normal Aquamacs key maps (`osx-key-mode-map') . (Note that even if rebound, the application menu will still show the A-q and A-, key bindings for Quit and Preferences, respectively). A-h remains unmappable for now. Reported by Chris Bernard.
  
• The mark is now deactivated when point is restored while switching tabs (in transient-mark-mode, which is on by default).
  
• Command-C (clipboard-kill-ring-save) will take care not to create duplicate entries in the kill ring. Reported by Konrad Podczeck.
  
• Fixed a rare failure of dired to view directories. Reported by Uwe Pieczynski.
  
• Fixed a startup failure when environment variables with values where used that could no be encoded with the coding system assigned to the system's ``input source'' language. (`locale-coding-system' is now set according to the locale in the default login shell.) Reported by André Berg.
  
• Fixed an error when deleting the whole buffer contents while smart-spacing-mode was on. Patch by Jon Shea.
  
• Fixed a potential security hole in smtpmail. Code by Simon Josefsson.
  
• `LaTex-mode-hook' can now be customized and saved through the customization interface. Reported by Bruno Cadonna.
  
• ESS (R-mode) will now retain an active mark (and region) after evaluating code, e.g. with C-c C-r.
  
• In the keyboard emulation modes that allow the mac-native use of Option on various keyboard layouts, while retaining Option as Meta key for Emacs, ESC key sequences always act as Meta sequences. For instance, with the German layout, ESC-l acts as `downcase-word' (the original M-l binding), while Option-l inserts the @ sign.
  
• Adopting fonts as default fonts for frames: keep frames inside screen. Reported by Stefan Vollmar.
  
• The Aquamacs application bundle has shrunk by about 17 MB thanks to compression. 

• From Aquamacs 1.4 on: Apple Mac OS X 10.4 or later
• PPC (G3, G4, G5) or Intel Mac.
• (for Aquamacs 1.3b and older, nightly build from CVS (PPC): Apple Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later is sufficient.)