Question

For those of us that like to use the graphical version of Vim or Emacs, instead of the console version, which version do you recommend?

For Vim, there’s Mac OS X Vim, MacVim, Vim-Cocoa.

For Emacs, CarbonEmacs, XEmacs, and Aquamacs.

Are there more? Which of these are ready for prime-time? If it’s a tough call, what are the trade-offs? Are all of these still being maintained?

No discussion of Vim versus Emacs, if you don’t mind, or comparisons with other editors.

Answer 1

MacVim works well and certainly looks more mature than Vim-Cocoa, moreover there is a Cocoa plugin architecture in the pipeline for MacVim (and someone is already working on a TextMate style file browser tray plugin which is a huge ++ IMHO).

There was also a Carbon version of Vim, but this didn’t offer a great deal over the Terminal version. i.e. only allowed one window open, not very OSX in appearance…

Aquamacs is very usable and looks pretty good. Supports both traditional Mac OS style keyboard shortcuts (command-O, command-S) and the Control/Meta shortcuts for those raised on traditional Emacs. It is definitely more Mac-like than Carbon Emacs. It seems stable and fast, but I am not an Emacs guru so I don’t stress it all that much when I use it. I can’t speak to the extensiveness of the included elisp packages, either.

Someone syncs Carbon Emacs with the upstream tree quarterly I think. Aquamacs has a more irregular schedule, but it’s seen some pretty major updates over the last year.

GNU Emacs for OSX can be found at emacsformacosx.com. In addition to the latest stable release, there are also pre-release test builds and nightly builds, and Atom feeds are provided for tracking all three release types.