Aquamacs vs Carbon Emacs
Aquamacs and Carbon Emacs are Emacs clones for the Mac OS X designed to have a native look and feel. Both Aquamacs and Carbon Emacs are based on Emacs code and can be described as builds or distributions of Emacs rather than forks: "Aquamacs uses the same code-base as GNU Emacs. As GNU Emacs evolves, so does Aquamacs. We keep our code-base synced. Actually, building Aquamacs involves compiling Emacs from the GNU Emacs CVS. Aquamacs contributes back to the GNU Emacs project." [1]
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[edit] Features
Aquamacs and Carbon Emacs have more in common than not since both are essentially a GUI wrapping around Emacs. The differences in features, therefore, are mostly superficial:
[edit] Look and Feel
Aquamacs "will feel and behave mostly like an Aqua program" [2]; Carbon Emacs behaves like a Carbon application.
[edit] Full Screen Mode
Both Aquamacs and Carbon Emacs support full-screen mode.
[edit] OS X Shortcut Keys
Both Aquamacs and Carbon Emacs support OS X shortcut keys. In Carbon Emacs, these shortcut keys must be enabled by setting the mac-key-mode.
[edit] Tab Support
Aquamacs has tab support. Carbon Emacs does not.
[edit] Multilingual Support
Aquamacs supports OS X's multilingual input out of the box. In Carbon Emacs, multilingual input can be enabled by setting default-input-method.
[edit] Popularity
Aquamacs has had over 200,000 downloads. [3]
[edit] Development
"Aquamacs Emacs has been developed by David Reitter (maintainer, david.reitter@gmail.com). GNU Emacs is the work of Richard Stallman and many other developers, including Andrew Choi who first ported GNU Emacs to the Mac. Kevin Walzer co-founded the project and wrote the initial documentation. Nathaniel Cunningham contributed code for the tabs. Adrian Chromenko contributed toolbar artwork." [4]
Carbon Emacs is maintained by Seiji Zenitani.
[edit] Licensing
Aquamacs is released under the GNU GPL. Carbon Emacs has "Dual license of the GNU GPL (v3) and the GPL-compatible licenses." [5]
