Emacs in MacOS X 10.5 Leopard
If you’ve upgraded to Leopard, and you’re an Emacs user, you may have found that typing emacs in a term no longer works — you get “Fatal malloc_jumpstart() error”. This will be the case if you’re using something like Fink or Darwin Ports, but it may also be the case if the upgrade didn’t quite work out.
The builds in Fink and Darwin Ports are currently broken; but otherwise, you have a few options to get Emacs back:
Use the Emacs that comes with Leopard. All this solution involves is making sure that any custom binary isn’t on the path — remove or move /sw/bin/emacs or /opt/local/bin/emacs (or possibly even /usr/local/bin/emacs) and make sure /usr/bin/emacs is the one installed with Leopard — /usr/bin/emacs –version should tell you the version is “22.1.1″.
The problem with the Emacs shipped with Leopard is that it’s built with no X support (or Carbon, for that matter)(although it does have Carbon support — see below).
Use Aquamacs. Aquamacs has precompiled binaries which work with Leopard. But, beware, it is quite different from Emacs in some ways — if you used Emacs before you used MacOS X, you probably won’t like it.
Compile your own Emacs. This is what I did. The stock 22.1 source distribution won’t build in Leopard; it gives up the ghost with a message “Assertion failed: (filesize <= ranges->size)”. However there is an unofficial patch, which worked for me. I’m going to keep my custom emacs until fink or ports catches up.
In summary (adapted slightly from here):
curl -O http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/emacs/emacs-22.1.tar.gz tar xvzf emacs-22.1.tar.gz cd emacs-22.1 curl -O http://ephemera.continuation.org/patches/emacs-leopard-unexec.patch patch -p0 < emacs-leopard-unexec.patch ./configure --without-carbon --with-x --prefix=/usr/local make sudo make install
I put the result in /usr/local and made sure /usr/local/bin was on my path before any of the other possibilities, while I wait for Fink or Ports to catch up.
UPDATE: Thanks to masklinn’s comment below, I can present another option which I’d overlooked:
Use carbonised Emacs. If you want to run Emacs in its own window, but don’t want X11, there is a ready-made .app wrapper in the source distribution. The disk image, which masklinn suggests, has patches and some very useful bundled Elisp packages, like nxml-mode.
You can also use the emacs distributed with Leopard with the .app wrapper, as jfb points out (see the second comment below); or, compile your own carbonised Emacs, similar to what I did above: change the configure invocation
./configure --with-carbon --without-x make cp -R mac/Emacs.app ./ cp src/emacs Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/ sudo mv Emacs.app /Applications/
Either way gives you an Emacs that behaves like a MacOSX app and doesn’t need X11 to run.
14 comments November 27th, 2007 mikeb