Emacs Plus

About

Emacs+ is → GNU Emacs formulae for macOS → Homebrew package manager. It offers a wide rage of extra functionality over regular → Emacs package. Emacs+ intent is to give the most of ‘plus’ stuff by default, leaving only controversial options as opt-in. Please refer to → Options section for more information.

$ brew tap d12frosted/emacs-plus
$ brew install emacs-plus    [options] # install the latest release (Emacs 28)
$ brew install emacs-plus@29 [options] # install Emacs 29 (master)
$ brew install emacs-plus@28 [options] # install Emacs 28
$ brew install emacs-plus@27 [options] # install Emacs 27
$ brew install emacs-plus@26 [options] # install Emacs 26

Feel free to open an issue or contact me via email if you face any issues, questions or feature requests. I love pull requests, so do send them. You might want to check → Development guidelines to have better understanding on how to contribute.

Table of Contents

• About
• Install
• Reinstall
• Emacs 29
  • Included
  • Options
  • No title bar
• Emacs 28
  • Included
  • Options
• Emacs 27
  • Included
  • Options
• Emacs 26
• Features explained
  • Injected PATH
  • No Titlebar
  • Xwidgets (webkit)
  • System appearance change
  • gccemacs
• Icons
• Emacs configuration
• Known Issues
  • =emacs= dependency in other formulas
• Screenshots
• Acknowledgements

Install

Emacs Plus contains separate formulas for different Emacs versions:

• emacs-plus install current release version (Emacs 28);
• emacs-plus@29 install Emacs 29, development version.
• emacs-plus@28 install Emacs 28, current release version.
• emacs-plus@27 install Emacs 27, previous release version;
• emacs-plus@26 install Emacs 26, previous release version;

  $ brew tap d12frosted/emacs-plus
  $ brew install emacs-plus    [options] # install the latest release (Emacs 28)
  $ brew install emacs-plus@29 [options] # install Emacs 29
  $ brew install emacs-plus@28 [options] # install Emacs 28
  $ brew install emacs-plus@27 [options] # install Emacs 27
  $ brew install emacs-plus@26 [options] # install Emacs 26
      

By default (without any addition options) this formula install Cocoa version of Emacs with support of gnutls, imagemagick (not included by default with emacs-plus@29 and emacs-plus@29), librsvg, libxml2, dynamic modules and multicolor fonts. Please see the list of available options to disable any bit of default behaviour or add even more stuff.

Reinstall

If you wish to reinstall emacs-plus with you should not use reinstall command of brew (not related to this formula, it’s a general advice). Instead, you should uninstall a package and then install it with desired options.

Avoid reinstall even if you want to reinstall with the same set of options, otherwise you will likely to get compilation errors! For example, #218 and #321.

In short, brew doesn’t really support options. They break time to time (brew#4793, brew#7397, brew#7498 to show a few).

$ brew uninstall emacs-plus
$ brew install emacs-plus [options]

Emacs 29

Included

By default emacs-plus@29 uses the following features.

• Injected PATH value from user shell (see separate section explaining this feature).
• Cocoa version, e.g. builds Emacs.app.
• Unconditional support for gnutls, librsvg, libxml2, little-cms2 and dynamic modules.

Options

Option	Description
--with-ctags	don’t remove the ctags executable that Emacs provides
--with-dbus	build with dbus support
--with-debug	build with debug symbols and debugger friendly optimizations
--with-mailutils	build with mailutils support
--with-no-frame-refocus	disables frame re-focus (ie. closing one frame does not refocus another one)
--with-x11	build with x11 support
--with-xwidgets	build → with xwidgets support
--without-cocoa	build a non-Cocoa version of Emacs (terminal only)
--with-imagemagick	build with imagemagick support
--with-native-comp	build with native compilation aka → gccemacs
--with-poll	build with poll() instead of select() to enable more file descriptors

No title bar

Please note, that --with-no-titlebar is no longer needed in Emacs 29, since the same can be achieved natively using this method.

Emacs 28

Included

By default emacs-plus@28 uses the following features.

• Injected PATH value from user shell (see separate section explaining this feature).
• Cocoa version, e.g. builds Emacs.app.
• Unconditional support for gnutls, librsvg, libxml2, little-cms2 and dynamic modules.

Options

Option	Description
--with-ctags	don’t remove the ctags executable that Emacs provides
--with-dbus	build with dbus support
--with-debug	build with debug symbols and debugger friendly optimizations
--with-mailutils	build with mailutils support
--with-no-frame-refocus	disables frame re-focus (ie. closing one frame does not refocus another one)
--with-no-titlebar	build → without titlebar
--with-no-titlebar-and-round-corners	build → without titlebar, but round corners instead of square
--with-x11	build with x11 support
--with-xwidgets	build → with xwidgets support
--without-cocoa	build a non-Cocoa version of Emacs (terminal only)
--with-imagemagick	build with imagemagick support
--HEAD	build from emacs-28 branch
--with-native-comp	build with native compilation aka → gccemacs

Emacs 27

Included

By default emacs-plus@27 uses the following features.

• Cocoa version, e.g. builds Emacs.app.
• Unconditional support for gnutls, librsvg, libxml2, little-cms2 and dynamic modules.

Options

Option	Description
--with-ctags	don’t remove the ctags executable that Emacs provides
--with-dbus	build with dbus support
--with-debug	build with debug symbols and debugger friendly optimizations
--with-mailutils	build with mailutils support
--with-no-frame-refocus	disables frame re-focus (ie. closing one frame does not refocus another one)
--with-no-titlebar	build → without titlebar
--with-x11	build with x11 support
--with-xwidgets	build → with xwidgets support
--without-cocoa	build a non-Cocoa version of Emacs (terminal only)
--without-imagemagick	build without imagemagick support
--HEAD	build from emacs-27 branch

Emacs 26

Emacs 26 comes without any available options due to → #195.

Features explained

Injected PATH

Ever find that a command works in your shell, but not in Emacs?

(c) @purcell

In macOS applications are started in the login environment, meaning that all user defined environment variables are not available in application process. In the most cases it’s not a big deal, but in Emacs it becomes a source of troubles as we want to use binaries from the non-standard locations (for example, those installed via package managers).

There is a wonderful solution to overcome this problem, purcell/exec-path-from-shell. As with any package that is not preinstalled with Emacs, you need to discover it first, and then install it. And while being a well known package and popular package (top 100 on MELPA), not everyone install it. In addition, with native-comp feature you might need it’s functionality before any package is bootstrapped.

All that being said, during installation Emacs+ injects value of PATH into Emacs.app/Contents/Info.plist file, making this value available whenever you start Emacs.app from Finder, Docker, Spotlight, open command in Terminal or via launchd. This solves a wide range of problems for GUI users without the need to use purcell/exec-path-from-shell, but if needed you can still fall back to this wonderful package, especially if you need other variables.

In case you have a non-trivial setup relying on specific value of PATH inherited from current terminal session, it is advised to start Emacs using /opt/homebrew/bin/emacs instead of open -n -a /path/to/Emacs.app, because open messes around with PATH value even without Emacs+ injection. You can find more information in #469.

And if for some reason PATH injection doesn’t work for you, report it either in #469 or open a new issue.

No Titlebar

square corners	round corners

Emacs 28 and Emacs 27

This patch is enabled with the --with-no-titlebar option for emacs-plus@27 and emacs-plus@28. It is meant for use with window tiling applications like → yabai, → chunkwm or → amethyst so that the titlebar won’t take up screen real estate.

Use --with-no-titlebar-and-round-corners option (instead of --with-no-titlebar), if you want to keep round corners (for example, to be consistent with other macOS applications).

If you see gaps between your emacs frames and other windows, try this:

(setq frame-resize-pixelwise t)

Emacs 29

In emacs-plus@29 this option is not available anymore as you can achieve the same result using Emacs Lisp by adding the following line in your early-init.el file:

(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(undecorated . t))

Add the following line instead for round corners:

(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(undecorated-round . t))

Xwidgets (webkit)

Browse the web in Emacs as in modern browser.

The original → Emacs xwidgets builds and works on macOS however must be used with X11 and hence not practical option on macOS. This version enables xwidgets on native macOS Cocoa via embedding a native webkit window.

More details can be seen here → Veshboo’s emacs branch.

System appearance change

This patch is enabled by default and can’t be disabled. It adds a hook, ns-system-appearance-change-functions, that is called once the system appearance is changed. Functions added to this hook will be called with one argument, a symbol that is either light or dark. This mainly allows loading a different theme to better match the system appearance.

(defun my/apply-theme (appearance)
  "Load theme, taking current system APPEARANCE into consideration."
  (mapc #'disable-theme custom-enabled-themes)
  (pcase appearance
    ('light (load-theme 'tango t))
    ('dark (load-theme 'tango-dark t))))

(add-hook 'ns-system-appearance-change-functions #'my/apply-theme)

Note that this hook is also run once when Emacs is initialized, so simply adding the above to your init.el will allow matching the system appearance upon startup. You can also determine what the current system appearance is by inspecting the value of the ns-system-appearance variable.

The hook is NOT run in TTY Emacs sessions.

gccemacs

gccemacs is a modified Emacs capable of compiling and running Emacs Lisp as native code in form of re-loadable elf files. As the name suggests this is achieved blending together Emacs and the gcc infrastructure.

→ Andrea Corallo

While gccemacs gives performance boost in many scenarios, this feature is still experimental and might require time and effort from your side for it to work! Use at our own risk :)

Please see official → gccemacs documentation for more information.

Knows issues:

• ld: library not found for -lSystem. This only happens on older versions of gcc installed by Homebrew. Please execute $ brew reinstall gcc libgccjit to resolve this issue.
• Errors during compilation of your init.el. Try running Emacs with -Q option and give it some time to compile everything (maybe run M-x to force compilation) - you shall see buffer *Async-native-compile-log* in the list of buffers.

Icons

Option	Author	Image	URL
--with-EmacsIcon1-icon	→ Jason Milkins		→ Link
--with-EmacsIcon2-icon	→ Jason Milkins		→ Link
--with-EmacsIcon3-icon	→ Jason Milkins		→ Link
--with-EmacsIcon4-icon	→ Jason Milkins		→ Link
--with-EmacsIcon5-icon	→ Jason Milkins		→ Link
--with-EmacsIcon6-icon	→ Jason Milkins		→ Link
--with-EmacsIcon7-icon	→ Jason Milkins		→ Link
--with-EmacsIcon8-icon	→ Jason Milkins		→ Link
--with-EmacsIcon9-icon	→ Jason Milkins		→ Link
--with-cacodemon-icon	→ Christian Westrom		→ Link
--with-dragon-icon	→ Will B Chang		→ Link
--with-elrumo1-icon	→ Elias		→ Link
--with-elrumo2-icon	→ Elias		→ Link
--with-emacs-card-blue-deep-icon	→ Jason Milkins		→ Link
--with-emacs-card-british-racing-green-icon	→ Jason Milkins		→ Link
--with-emacs-card-carmine-icon	→ Jason Milkins		→ Link
--with-emacs-card-green-icon	→ Jason Milkins		→ Link
--with-gnu-head-icon	→ Aurélio A. Heckert		→ Link
--with-memeplex-slim-icon	→ memeplex		→ Link
--with-memeplex-wide-icon	→ memeplex		→ Link
--with-modern-alecive-flatwoken-icon	→ Alessandro Roncone		→ Link
--with-modern-asingh4242-icon	→ Asingh4242		→ Link
--with-modern-azhilin-icon	Andrew Zhilin		→ Link
--with-modern-bananxan-icon	→ BananXan		→ Link
--with-modern-black-dragon-icon	→ Osike		→ Link
--with-modern-black-gnu-head-icon	→ Aha-Soft		→ Link
--with-modern-black-variant-icon	→ BlackVariant		→ Link
--with-modern-bokehlicia-captiva-icon	→ Bokehlicia		→ Link
--with-modern-cg433n-icon	→ cg433n		→ Link
--with-modern-doom-icon	→ Eccentric J		→ Link
--with-modern-doom3-icon	→ Eccentric J		→ Link
--with-modern-icon	Unknown		Unknown
--with-modern-mzaplotnik-icon	→ Matjaz Zaplotnik		→ Link
--with-modern-nuvola-icon	→ David Vignoni		→ Link
--with-modern-orange-icon	→ Omar Jair Purata Funes		→ Link
--with-modern-paper-icon	→ Sam Hewitt		→ Link
--with-modern-papirus-icon	→ Papirus Development Team		→ Link
--with-modern-pen-3d-icon	Unknown		→ Link
--with-modern-pen-black-icon	→ Cayetano Santos		→ Link
--with-modern-pen-icon	→ Kentaro Ohkouchi		→ Link
--with-modern-pen-lds56-icon	→ lds56		→ Link
--with-modern-purple-flat-icon	→ Jeremiah Foster		→ Link
--with-modern-sexy-v1-icon	→ Emacs is Sexy		→ Link
--with-modern-sexy-v2-icon	→ Emacs is Sexy		→ Link
--with-modern-sjrmanning-icon	→ sjrmannings		→ Link
--with-modern-vscode-icon	→ Valentin Degenne		→ Link
--with-modern-yellow-icon	Unknown		→ Link
--with-nobu417-big-sur-icon	→ Nobuyuki Sato		→ Link
--with-retro-emacs-logo-icon	→ Luis Fernandes		→ Link
--with-retro-gnu-meditate-levitate-icon	Nevrax Design Team		→ Link
--with-retro-sink-bw-icon	Unknown		→ Link
--with-retro-sink-icon	→ Erik Mugele		→ Link
--with-spacemacs-icon	→ Nasser Alshammari		→ Link

Emacs configuration

Emacs is a journey. And for some of you these projects might be inspiring.

• → Steve Purcell’s .emacs.d
• → Spacemacs
• → doom-emacs
• → Prelude

Known Issues

Please checkout → Issues page for a list of all known issues. But here are several you should be aware of.

emacs dependency in other formulas

In some cases (like when installing cask) regular emacs package will be required. In such cases you might want to install all dependencies manually (except for emacs) and then install desired package with --ignore-dependencies option.

$ brew install cask --ignore-dependencies

Screenshots

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to all → contributors, issue reporters and bottle providers (→ Sudarshan Wadkar, → Jon Hermansen).

Special thanks to patrons supporting existence of this project:

• → Johanan Idicula
• → Lyndon Drake