Development

Development of the Aquamacs distribution is ongoing; the user interface is far from complete. In particular, such items as configuration systems, sliders and the mini-windows inside the windows will need further work. We welcome contributions from the community, whether they are elisp code that improves OS X UI compatibility, or patches to the mac-specific C code, which would be too early to submit for inclusion in the main Emacs development branch.

Nightly development builds

If you want to test the latest developments in Aquamacs, download the nightly builds here.

Getting the source code

CVS Access

Compiling Aquamacs from CVS is easy. All you need is Apple's Developer Tools and OS X 10.3.9 or later. We have a developer's home at Sourceforge, and all source code can be checked out via anonymous CVS. There are lengthy explanations, but the low-down is:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.aquamacs.org:/cvsroot/aquamacs login
(Press Return when prompted for password.)
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.aquamacs.org:/cvsroot/aquamacs co -P aquamacs

Refer to the BuildingAquamacs Wiki page for instructions on how to build it. It's pretty much automatic.

Want to see the latest CVS change log? Check this out... (also, the complete changelog)

Releases

The source code for releases is also available.

Patches and other contributions

Your contributions are more than welcome!

Potential Developers should subscribe and post to the developer mailing list with questions, comments, and contributions.

Authors

Aquamacs Emacs has been developed by David Reitter (maintainer, ). GNU Emacs is the work of Richard Stallman and many other developers, including Andrew Choi who first ported GNU Emacs to the Mac. Kevin Walzer co-founded the project and contributed the documentation.

We would also like to acknowledge the contributions of these authors, whose source code and hints on public forums have already been integrated into the build:
Drew Adams, Lawrence Akka, Emil Astrom, Stefan Bruda, Mahn-Soo Choi, Steve Dodd, Massimiliano Gubinelli (Emacs icon), Kyle E. Jones, Terry Jones, Pekka Marjola, Yamamoto Mitsuharu, Gerd Neugebauer, Ovidiu Predesc, Steven Tamm, Bob Weiner, Milan Zamazal, Seiji Zenitani.

The Aquamacs distribution of Emacs is released under the GNU General Public License. Source code for the base build comes from Emacs CVS, while the customizations are bundled in with the application package itself.

Is Aquamacs a fork of GNU Emacs?

We're distributing a modified version of GNU Emacs together with a set of add-ons, some of which are stand-alone packages, others are part of a large-scale customization effort to make Emacs more user-friendly, particularily for users on modern, GUI-based operating systems.

While some may think that this constitutes a fork, we respectfully disagree and point out two arguments. Aquamacs uses the same code-base as GNU Emacs. As GNU Emacs evolves, so does Aquamacs. We keep our code-base synced. Actually, building Aquamacs involves compiling Emacs from the GNU Emacs CVS. Aquamacs contributes back to the GNU Emacs project. Selected changes that were developed for and within Aquamacs are being submitted back to the GNU Emacs project. Just to give an example: Mac users haven't been able to use the bug reporting function - their reports were swallowed without notice. Now, they can do so using GNU Emacs, thanks to code developed for Aquamacs. Numerous bugs have been reported through the development of Aquamacs, and we have successfully lobbied for better support of Unicode fonts. Aquamacs has and will continue to contribute to GNU Emacs.