Aquamacs News

Aquamacs 2.0 released

The Aquamacs Project is proud to announce the release of Aquamacs 2.0, the leading Mac-friendly variant of the widely-used editor Emacs. It is a versatile, fast and mature editor for source code, web pages, typesetting documents and all other forms of text. Emacs is a text editor of legendary flexibility and has made millions of programmers and writers very productive. Numerous packages allow users to extend its functionality.

Aquamacs is optmized for Mac user interface conventions. That means more than just the fact that this version of Emacs runs as a standard OS X application. Earlier versions of Emacs also had an enormously complex user interface. That is different in Aquamacs, which behaves the way Mac users expect. Aquamacs looks good and integrates well with other applications on the Mac. Normal OS X keyboard commands are offered along with the extended Emacs ones. No complicated installation is needed. Yet it's still a real Emacs with all the ergonomy and extensibility that this world-class editor is famous for.

Version 2.0 is a major update with the following improvements and enhancements:

Aquamacs 2.0 includes the following improvements:
• Now fully based on Cocoa, a modern technology that facilitates program development and maintenance, supports 64-bit computing on Macs and allows for better integration of applications with the operating system and other applications.
• New application icon and streamlined name.
• Significantly improved dialogs for opening, saving, and printing files, configuring fonts and colors, and displaying user messages.
• Text display now fully based on Unicode.
• More consistency and configurability in key bindings.
• Improvements in configurability of toolbars.
• Numerous updates in major included Emacs editing modes, including Python, Ruby, ESS, LaTeX/AucTeX, and more.

Founded by the father of Free Software, Richard M. Stallman, Emacs has a long history that began some thirty years ago. He is helped by a group of volunteers. Aquamacs includes the latest GNU Emacs and is maintained by David Reitter and his team of enthusiastic users, Mac lovers and Emacs experts.

Aquamacs is Free Software and open-source. It is a universal binary, supporting both PPC and Intel, and requires Mac OS X 10.5.8 or newer to run. For more imformation and to download, please see http://aquamacs.org.

Contact (media inquiries only): Dr. David Reitter, david.reitter@gmail.com, +1 412 417 0529 (timezone: EST)