macOS No Longer Ships with Emacs
3 months ago
- #macOS
- #Emacs
- #GPL
- Apple stopped shipping Emacs 22.1 with macOS starting with macOS 10.15 ('Catalina') in October 2019.
- The ancient version of Emacs caused issues for users who accidentally ran it instead of newer versions.
- Apple did not update Emacs due to opposition to GPL v3; Emacs 22.1 was the last version under GPL v2.
- A former Apple employee stated that newer Emacs versions had license incompatibility with macOS.
- Apple suggested using 'brew install emacs' for those who need Emacs.
- Apple replaced Emacs with 'mg' (Micro Emacs) as a lightweight command-line editor alternative.
- Similar to Emacs, Apple switched from an ancient version of Bash to Zsh in macOS 10.15 due to GPL v3 concerns.