Running Carbon Emacs.app 22.3 on Snow Leopard

Here’s how to get the Carbon GUI version of Emacs 22.3 running on Snow Leopard. It won’t compile on Snow Leopard, so you need to compile it on Leopard.

Ingredients:

• a mac running OS X 10.5.8 with Xcode 3.1.x installed
• a mac running OS X 10.6.0 with Xcode 3.2 installed
• the Emacs sources, emacs-22.3.tar.gz

On the 10.5.8 mac, extract the emacs sources and compile them:

tar xzf emacs-22.3.tar.gz
cd emacs-22.3
./configure --enable-carbon-app && nice make -j2

On the 10.6 mac, copy the emacs-22.3 directory from the 10.5.8 mac and install. The path ‘/Volumes/francis’ in the commands below is my home directory on the 10.5.8 mac, which I mounted on the 10.6 mac in Finder:

ditto /Volumes/francis/Code/unmodified/emacs-22.3 emacs-22.3
cd emacs-22.3
sudo make install

You should now have a working /Applications/Emacs.app on your 10.6 (Snow Leopard) mac 🙂