Aquamacs Development

Interested in working on Aquamacs? Subscribe and post to our developer mailing list with development questions, comments, and contributions.

The following mailing lists are available:

• aquamacs-devel: for developer discussion (subscription required to post)
• Emacs on OSX (Archives): for support questions from and interaction with users (subscription required to post)

All mailing lists are public and you are welcome to join!

The bug tracker for all Aquamacs versions is at Aquamacs issues on GitHub.

Issues with the web site can be reported at Aquamacs web site issues on GitHub.

Development builds will be back soon!

The Aquamacs web site is written in Org mode files, compiled for the web using Hugo, and hosted on GitHub pages. You can make suggestions and contribute changes to these web pages at using the Aquamacs web site issue tracker, with reports or pull requests.

Compiling Aquamacs from the Git repository is (relatively) easy. You need Apple's XCode and a few things from the Homebrew package manager. The code is available from GitHub at Aquamacs Emacs. You can get a shallow (quick) checkout by using

git clone --depth 3 https://github.com/aquamacs-emacs/aquamacs-emacs

or, for a full checkout:

git clone https://github.com/aquamacs-emacs/aquamacs-emacs

See the README file in the Aquamacs source code for information about compiling Aquamacs.

Want to see the latest change log? Check this out…

The major branches for Aquamacs development are:

[main, aquamacs3] aquamacs-emacs/aquamacs-emacs: Aquamacs Emacs

This is the source code for the public release version Aquamacs 3.6. It will change to the Aquamacs 4 version when it is ready.

[aquamacs-4-dev] aquamacs-emacs/aquamacs-emacs at aquamacs-4-dev

This is the development branch for continuing work on Aquamacs 4. If you want to look at or contribute to current development, this is the one to track.

[aquamacs-4] aquamacs-emacs/aquamacs-emacs at aquamacs4

This will be the reference branch for Aquamacs 4 releases when they begin.

Other branches are historical and will be cleaned up eventually.

Your contributions are more than welcome! Just send e-mail to aquamacs-devel@googlegroups.com or make a pull request on the appropriate branch (mainly aquamacs-4-dev).

Aquamacs Emacs was originally developed primarily by David Reitter. GNU Emacs is the work of Richard Stallman and many other developers, including Andrew Choi, Yamamoto Mitsuharu, and Adrian Robert, who ported GNU Emacs to the Mac. Kevin Walzer co-founded the project and wrote the initial documentation. Nathaniel Cunningham contributed code for the tabbar, among other things. Sidney Markowitz contributed code. Adrian Chromenko and Jessica Walker contributed artwork. Many others have contributed to Aquamacs during its history.

Aquamacs is currently maintained by Win Treese (treese@acm.org).

We would also like to acknowledge the contributions of the authors of the packages whose source code and hints on public forums have already been integrated into the build.

The Aquamacs distribution of Emacs is released under the GNU General Public License. Source code for the base build is a branch of GNU Emacs. Most customizations are bundled in with the application package itself.

Aquamacs is a large-scale customization effort to make Emacs more user-friendly, particularily for users on modern, GUI-based operating systems. Through continuous development over more than fifteen years, Aquamacs has become a distinct application. While you could see Aquamacs as a friendly fork, please consider this: Aquamacs uses the same code-base as GNU Emacs. As GNU Emacs evolves, so does Aquamacs. We keep our code synced by merging from the GNU Emacs development branch. 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 (e.g., bug reporting and mail sending functions, mailclient.el). Numerous bugs have been reported through the development of Aquamacs, and we have successfully lobbied for better support of many things relevant to Mac users and GNU/Linux users alike, such as soft word wrapping. Technically speaking, Aquamacs is a downstream project, developing a distribution of GNU Emacs.