Mac OS X Tiger Emacs Incompatibilities
by Josh Staiger
I just upgraded to Mac OS X Tiger (10.4), and unfortunately this killed my Emacs setup.
Carbon Emacs has stopped working, as has DoubleCommand, which I had been using to remap my PowerBook's enter key to ctrl (I'm completely lost in Emacs without this).
To fix the general Emacs problem, I've replaced Carbon Emacs with John Wiseman's Aqua build of Emacs, available via Dan Moniz here. Looks pretty sexy.
Unfortunately at the time of writing there is no Tiger-compatible version of DoubleCommand, nor the equivalent uControl.
Emacs is dead to me without a right ctrl key, and I use Emacs a lot.
I read Technote TN2056, but it mentions nothing about how to remap modifier keys.
Does anyone know of a general way to remap modifier functions (ctrl, option, cmd, shift, etc.) to other keys under Mac OS X?
In the meantime I'm offering my services to both the uControl and DoubleCommand projects to help get them ported to Tiger. I just wish that I knew more about Mach Kernel hacking...
UPDATE 5/26/2005:
The MacOS X 10.4.1 update kills the Aqua Emacs build that I linked to above. Once again, Dan Moniz has an updated version.
As far as remapping the enter key goes, I've been been participating in the uControl mailing list. Owing to the fact that Apple has added the ability to remap the caps lock key to control in the OS, uControl's maintainer, Shane Cells, has retired. Development appears to have stopped for the foreseeable future.
Heiko Hellweg has instructions for remapping the enter key on ADB keyboards. Unfortunately this does not work with newer Powerbooks (like mine) which use a USB keyboard.
I recommend heading over to http://bugreport.apple.com to file a feature request for the ability to remap the enter key so that hopefully this problem will be officially solved in the future.
UPDATE 7/28/2005:
See my comment below for information on using Emacs under X11 with the enter key remapped.
UPDATE 8/23/2005:
We finally have keyboard remapping utilities for Mac OS X 10.4!