Emacs Modified for macOS

Emacs Modified for macOS is a distribution of GNU Emacs 29.4 bundled with the following packages:

From ELPA

• ESS 25.1.0;
• AUCTeX 14.0.8;

From MELPA-stable

• polymode 0.2.2 and the polymodes poly-R, poly-noweb, poly-markdown;
• markdown-mode 2.6;
• exec-path-from-shell 2.2 to import the user’s environment at Emacs startup;

From other sources

• Tabbar 2.2;
• dictionaries for the Hunspell spell checker (optional; see below for details);
• psvn.el r1573006, an interface for the version control system Subversion modified to include Andre Colomb’s and Koji Nakamaru’s combined patches to support Subversion 1.7;
• default.el and site-start.el, configuration files to make everything work.

The current version is 29.4-modified-3. Release notes

System requirements

Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

Installation

Open the disk image and copy Emacs in the Applications folder or any other folder.

Interaction with the Emacs package system

Many of the bundled packages are installed from archives using the Emacs package system. Therefore, by default the system is active and the packages are initialized. Because we have done this for you, your init file should not contain the expression (package-initialize).

You may install additional packages locally, but you should refrain from updating the bundled packages (marked external in M-x list-packages). To install packages from the MELPA archive, add the following lines to your init file:

(add-to-list 'package-archives
             '("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/") t)

Spell checking and dictionaries

Spell checking inside Emacs on macOS requires an external checker. I recommend to install Hunspell using Homebrew.

The Hunspell installation does not include any dictionaries. Therefore, this distributions of Emacs ships with the following Libre Office dictionaries suitable for use with Hunspell: English (version 2025.01.01); French (version 5.7); German (version 2017.01.12); Spanish (version 2.9).

To make use of the dictionaries, copy the files in the Dictionaries directory of the disk image to ~/Library/Spelling. If needed, create a symbolic link named after your LANG environment variable to the corresponding dictionary and affix files. For example, if LANG is set to fr_CA.URF-8, do from the command line

$ cd ~/Library/Spelling
$ ln -s fr-classique.dic fr_CA.dic
$ ln -s fr-classique.aff fr_CA.aff

Finally, if you have a Mac with an Apple Silicon CPU (M1 and above), add the following lines to your ~/.emacs file:

(setq-default ispell-program-name "/opt/homebrew/bin/hunspell")
(setq ispell-really-hunspell t)

For an Intel CPU, use instead:

(setq-default ispell-program-name "/usr/local/bin/hunspell")
(setq ispell-really-hunspell t)

Spell checking should now work with M-x ispell.