alt.hn

2/6/2026 at 3:53:03 PM

macOS No Longer Ships with Emacs

 https://batsov.com/articles/2025/01/12/macos-no-longer-ships-with-emacs/

by tosh

2/7/2026 at 7:16:43 AM

I still use the ancient bash on macOS. And the jq that happens to be there, which I think was new in macOS 26? (WWDC hinted it would be in macOS 15, but IIRC it wasn't)

I honestly had no idea that emacs ever shipped with it.

This is probably as good a place as any to ask: why does the macOS vi return a nonzero exit code when I make any error at all? Like if I search for text that doesn't exist in the file, or mistype at the : prompt, and then (successfully) save and quit, it returns 1. This is bad when I'm using it as the editor for something like git commit, which will fail if $EDITOR returns nonzero. No other vi/vim seems to behave this way.

by badc0ffee

2/6/2026 at 8:32:39 PM

reminds me of a funny anecdote from my first job in the tech industry. all of the team's VM's had VIM installed, but no emacs. when I asked a teammate if we could add emacs to the bsse image, he responded "It already has an OS, we don't need another one."

by lazystar

2/6/2026 at 11:13:46 PM

Boom!

by tomcam

2/6/2026 at 10:50:16 PM

`EDITOR=mg` is a great find. I never knew of it before! One caveat I found is that it doesn’t support unicode (at least not in the default mac installation).

by code_martial

2/6/2026 at 11:17:58 PM

Very interesting article. But why does Apple want to avoid GPL v3?

edit: found this previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20102640

by ethansinjin

2/7/2026 at 3:30:02 AM

The situation has gotten more complex since that discussion, too. Modern versions of macOS use an immutable root partition [1]; shipping GPLv3 code in that partition could arguably be a violation of the license.

[1]: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/signed-system-volum...

by duskwuff

2/7/2026 at 2:58:56 AM

Gotta reduce the bloat somehow.

by cozzyd