The last few dozen times I looked into Emacs for Mac OS X, I had settled on Enhanced Carbon Emacs, and had been using it for a while with great success. Recently, I started on a major project that required long editing sessions with several files open at a time (not many), and began to notice that it would crash once every couple of days. I can't tell if this is natural for EC-Emacs, or if I activated a buggy mode or something (I started using Subversion, automatically activating SVN mode).

So I made one more attempt to look for the current status on Emacs for OS X native—that is, an Emacs build for OS X 10.3 that doesn't require X11 be running. I had heard that the official GNU Emacs source distribution has included Mac OS X support for a while, but I assumed X11 would be required. I'm pleased to see that not only can you get the absolute latest Emacs built for OS X 10.3 from CVS, but it comes on a disk image, in a package, with an installer, and includes Andrew Choi's Carbon support, no X11 needed. Time will tell if it has any of the problems I experienced with the older EC-Emacs distribution.

Emacs Wiki on Mac OS X (and 9). Emacs Wiki: MacOSTweaks.

Between the time I noticed crashing problems in EC-Emacs and started using the GNU Emacs build, I gave BBEdit a whirl. It's nice, it's stable, it's OS X native, and does quite a bit, especially for editing HTML. But its features for programmers are weak compared to Emacs and other IDEs. Its plugin SDK requires CodeWarrior, which means fewer people are extending it than would be otherwise. At $179, it's way too expensive. If it were $79, I probably would have purchased it by now.