I’ve been writing a lot lately about Álvaro Ramírez’s Journelly, an iOS app that I use constantly everyday. It’s a great app that I recommend for everyone. But Ramírez has been writing apps for Emacs and iOS for a long time. A previous iOS app of his that I used and liked—before Journelly largely replaced it—is scr that sort of implements an Emacs ∗scratch∗ buffer on your iPhone or iPad. I’ve also written extensively about his dwim-shell-command package that provides all sorts of command line shortcuts from within Emacs.
All of this is by way of an introduction to Ramírez’s recent post on tricks for using Emacs on macOS. It’s a long post with a plethora of strategies for using Emacs on Macs. He starts off by mentioning that he uses Emacs Plus—available from Homebrew—rather than compiling it from source, as he used to do. I still compile from source but on my next machine I may take the easy route and use Emacs Plus too.
Another thing he mentions is a point I often make: Although he was a GNU/Linux user for many years, he now works primary on macOS but this doesn’t matter because he does almost everything in Emacs or his browser so the he can get away with being pretty much OS agnostic. The true believers will gasp in horror but it’s a truth that many of us have discovered.
As for the tips, they are too numerous to list here. Most people probably won’t like all of them but I’d be surprised if anyone couldn’t find something useful in the post. For my part, I really liked his configuration for long press for accents and Plain Org for iOS. I expect to implement both of these in the near future.
If you use Emacs on macOS you should definitely take a look at Ramírez’s post. You’re sure to find something useful.