I just upgraded my iMac and MacBook Pro to the new OS X, Mavericks. The upgrade went flawlessly—everything should work as well—and my iMac came up without a problem. I spend most of my time in Emacs, of course, so it was the first thing I checked out. No problems.
A bit later, my MacBook finished upgrading and again it came up without a problem but Emacs got an error very early in loading init.el and there wasn’t much indication of what was wrong. I was a bit confused because the same init.el is pulled from a Git archive for both machines so why was it working on the iMac but not the MacBook?
I drag in platform and system specific configuration with the code
;; Just keep on going if the requisite file isn't there. ;; Manipulations in second load is for "gnu/linux" → "linux" (load (car (split-string (system-name) "\\.")) t) (load (car (reverse (split-string (symbol-name system-type) "/"))) t)
The MacBook is named manfred so I tried loading manfred.el manually and got the error. The manfred.el file is pretty simple
;; -*- mode: Emacs-Lisp -*- ;; Time-stamp: <Sunday, October 28, 2012 16:21:00 EDT (by jcs)> ;; Emacs configuration specific to manfred (set-frame-height (selected-frame) 53) (display-battery-mode 1)
so the problem was obvious. Apparently the Mavericks battery interface changed from Mountain Lion so the display of battery status was failing.
I’ll probably take a look at the code to see what I can do but displaying battery status on the mode line is not a high priority so it’s not an urgent problem. The point of this post is to alert other Mac users who upgrade to Mavericks about the problem. It’s only a problem if you display battery status, of course, so probably only affects Laptop users.