On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 12:20 PM, Joerg Wunsch <[email protected]> wrote: > Curious question from a non-MacOS but Emacs user: why -nw? Is the > windowing version not supported? (I use emacs -nw when being logged > into a remote side through ssh, but would always prefer the graphical > front-end otherwise.)
There are two parts to this answer first: I seem to remember that at least on older versions of MacOS emacs was included, but the GUI didn't run. Also if the OP needed to install emacs then I would put the chances of success for getting the console version running at 98% and changes for gui version at 80% just because of added complexity from toolkit and X server version compatibility and pre-requisites. Second part of the answer is that I never used the Emacs GUI. It does work fine and has many innovative features. However, I learned emacs mostly from the console and started aliasing emacs to 'emacs -nw' years ago so that I wouldn't accidentally try to start up a remote X gui. I find the console emacs to be slightly lower latency and it works on every platform I have tried it on with minimal configuration and no X server to setup. For example you can run emacs -nw under Cygwin fast and easy, but running an X server is slower and less reliable. Since I never touch the mouse when editing text, I don't miss any mouse related GUI features. Also it is very fast to type ^Z to get to the console and do other tasks or switch to a backgrounded emacs session with a different working directory related to a completely different project. A guess a final point is that for a Mac user the command line editor might look cool and unixy, but the emacs GUI might just look ugly. (Maybe there is a nice carbon GUI available now for Mac I wouldn't know.) Probably more info than you wanted... -Matt _______________________________________________ AVR-chat mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/avr-chat
