I’m seriously considering buying an M2 MacBook, after over 20 years on Linux. My main concern is whether it will be difficult to set up Emacs after such a long-term investment in my init files. I would love to hear from others who have made the same transition – was it hard? Do you have tips to make it easier?

Thanks in advance!

  • nadacortex@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I use the same configuration shared between MacBook M2 and Linux without any issues. Simply install homebrew on macOS, that will provide any additional tool you might need and directly allows to install emacs.

  • Themorgasm13000@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    My work dev machine is an M2 Pro. I didn’t find it at all hard to set up. If you don’t know already homebrew is a macos package manager and you can use it to install emacs with a bunch of feature flags without having to compile it yourself. The only problem i’ve run into is that I can’t start emacs from the spotlight menu but that’s fine since I start it from a terminal. Here’s the package I use: https://github.com/d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus

  • Magiel@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Use homebrew, and make sure it uses the Arm architecture for compilation.

  • MitchellMarquez42@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    MacOS is pretty good, it’s a proper Unix system. Emacs works well, tho there are some eccentricities. Font size for example works very differently on Mac displays because there’s a lot more pixels.

  • camachojua@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Well, we all know that our only true OS is emacs, so go ahead.

    There are tons of taps (homebrew) or flakes (nix) to get a proper installation.

  • seaborgiumaggghhh@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I use nix and home-manager to configure emacs on my personal and work macbooks. It works great. I can’t stand homebrew

  • gammarray@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Any love for emacs-mac out there? It’s got support for the stipple face attribute required for indent-bars ✨

  • dm_g@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    The only HUGE thing to consider is that the file system of MacOS by default case preserving, not case sensitive. So make sure don’t have files named Abc and ABC in the same directory.

    I used to use Emacs primarily in Linux, but lately I am mostly using MacOS (Hammespoon made it possible). I find them to be equivalent once you set the keyboard accordingly.

    At the beginning of my init.el I set a variable to know the OS and Machine where I am running, and do conditional configuration based on this. That way I can separate OS related configs for each of them. I run the exact emacs configuration in my different computers with different OSs.

    Learn to use homebrew and make sure the binaries your emacs config uses (if any) are present (at the beginning of your init.el). I find dependency management slightly easier in linux than homebrew.

    Another issue to consider is that Unix utilities in MacOS are not the FSF ones (instead, they are from BSDs). This means that commands like grep have different parameters in OS X (but that is usually handled by the emacs packages, usually).

  • titaniumbones@alien.topOPBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    thanks everyone, all of htis is really helpful – seems like I shouldn’t have any big problems. Much appreciated!