Color emoji was deliberately disabled on macOS (2016): policy first, parity later.
Emacs 25 turned off multicolor fonts on the Cocoa port even though they worked, with a NEWS note saying they’d be re-enabled "once it is also implemented in Emacs on free operating systems." This was widely read as a political parity requirement that penalized macOS users for years.
"Prefer GNU/GNU-Linux" development time: an explicit guideline.
GNU’s own standards advise spending time on features "useful on GNU and GNU/Linux, rather than on supporting other incompatible systems." That guideline has often been cited in Emacs discussions to argue against platform-specific work that would land only on macOS.
macOS-only features face extra process friction, or must be generalized.
The "send-to" (macOS Sharing) patch was finally merged in 2025 -- but only after a lengthy debate and a rework into a cross-platform framework to satisfy GNU policy concerns about adding features that target a non-free OS first. (The end result is good! -- but the path illustrates the extra hurdles for macOS-first work.)
Long-running reliance on mac-specific forks to get a polished UX.
For years, many mac users have depended on Mitsuharu Yamamoto's Emacs Mac port (emacs-mac) or distributions like Aquamacs to get native scrolling, gestures, font/rendering tweaks, and other integrations that either lagged upstream or weren’t accepted. The continued popularity and active maintenance of these forks reflects a gap in first-party mac attention.
Recent high-profile macOS performance pathology highlighted as "non-primary platform" pain.
In 2025, a widely-read analysis ("Emacs: The macOS Bug") traced severe jank/memory growth to how Emacs drives Cocoa’s runloop (e.g., NSApp run usage inside the select/IO path), arguing that historical architecture -- plus macOS not being a primary target -- left deep issues unaddressed for years. Follow-on bug threads on emacs-devel discuss memory fragmentation and event handling. This is more engineering history than politics, but it shows practical consequences of platform de-prioritization.
FSF position on non-free systems frames the culture.
FSF materials repeatedly emphasize using and prioritizing free systems. Even where they explicitly say they didn’t drop support for non-free OSes, the values signal still affects triage, reviews, and what maintainers feel comfortable merging first. This shapes outcomes like color emoji support and the review friction in the "send-to" patch.
2008–2010, the long, bumpy road to a native Mac port:
During Emacs 23’s cycle the old Carbon port was "completely broken ... for almost a year," and was ultimately removed when the new Cocoa/Nextstep port was merged. For years many Mac users relied on forks (Aquamacs, Mitsuharu's "Emacs Mac Port") for a smoother experience, reinforcing the "not a first-class target" vibe.
RMS isn't only against Emacs on Macs and Windows. He also has some strong opinions about UniPress Software, who sold a version of Gosling's Emacs for Gosling's own NeWS window system, Apple Lisa, Mac, MS-DOS, Amiga, Xenix, SGI IRIX, Intergraph, xePIX, Northern Telecom, Cadmus, DEC Rainbow, VMS, VAX BSD, DECWRL Titan, TI Professional, Masscomp, Apollo, HP, Stride, AT&T 3B, System V, Gould, NBI U! ("Nifty Box"), Pyramid, Perkin-Elmer, Cray UniCos, and many other proprietary Unix systems.
>I worked at UniPress on the Emacs display driver for the NeWS window system (the PostScript based window system that James Gosling also wrote), with Mike "Emacs Hacker Boss" Gallaher, who was charge of Emacs development at UniPress. One day during the 80's Mike and I were wandering around an East coast science fiction convention, and ran into RMS, who's a regular fixture at such events.
>Mike said: "Hello, Richard. I heard a rumor that your house burned down. That's terrible! Is it true?"
>RMS replied right back: "Yes, it did. But where you work, you probably heard about it in advance."
>Everybody laughed. It was a joke! Nobody's feelings were hurt. He's a funny guy, quick on his feet!
Wow that's a wall of text proving pretty much nothing, other than that RMS is an out of touch goofball.
As I and others have noted, actually using emacs on a Macintosh is dead easy. MacOS ships with an older terminal version, so you don't even have to download anything if you're fine with that distro. OTOH, multiple native build distributions exist and are a click away.
I spend a good chunk of my day in a native build between text, scripting, and Orgmode, and, again, it's just not a problem. It's far easier, in fact, to use emacs on a Mac than on Windows precisely because MacOS is a unixy environment.
It only proves nothing if you didn't bother reading it (which you words "wall of text" imply) and didn't check any of the links proving what I said. Instead of dismissing everything by handwaving, please tell me which specific points I made that you disagree with, and what is your evidence?
How long have you been using Emacs, yourself? If you just got started a few years ago, then that excuses your ignorance of history (but not your unwillingness to learn), but there is a LOT of well documented history about Emacs on the Mac, and all those links you didn't bother following prove it.
You can't win an argument by being ignorant of history, claiming tl;dr, and refusing to look at the evidence. That's just conceding my points by default. Can you do any better than that?
It feels like this changed roughly in the last five years. That's about how long I've been using Emacs on Mac.
I'd mostly been using Sublime / Atom / Eclipse / Vim before that (and a long list of other IDEs and editors going back to Turbo Pascal 3.0 on IBM XTs). So perhaps I've not felt the same pain.
I'm glad I can use Emacs at work (on Macs) and at home (on Linux). The funny thing is it's been easier to get Emacs up and running on Mac than on Linux. To get the latest stable Emacs I had to pull the source and build it myself (Ubuntu repos had old versions). On Mac it was just finding the right cask in Homebrew.
The point is that you came in here with a pasted wall of text with a whole bunch of urls claiming emacs users on MacOS are somehow 3rd class citizens because ... of things from long ago, I guess.
My point, Don, is that these long-ago issues are now irrelevant. Your position here runs utterly counter to the lived experience of Mac emacs users.
I don't care what RMS did in 2005. It's not relevant to using emacs on a Mac in 2025.
I don't even need to care about the history of emacs on the Mac, or whatever other ill-advised chicanery the FSF has committed on this or any other point (and, not to put too fine a point on it, but at 55 I've seen plenty of goofy own-goals from that crowd).
What matters now is "gee, how easy is it for a Mac user to access and use emacs productively?" That answer, for at least the last 8 to 10 years (which is also the answer to your gatekeepy question), has been "very!" You open terminal and type "emacs," or you download a build that runs as a gui from any of several maintainers. You're done.
It's about as simple as it is to run it on a Linux box (which I also do), and far simpler than getting it to behave under Windows (and I have those scars, too).
My thoughts too. I've never had any real problems running it on Windows myself, but it doesn't feel like Mac users are any worse off.
I've been using Mac Emacs since about 2010, so perhaps I dodged some of the worst stuff, and it's always felt - for good or for ill - very much the same as using it on Windows or Linux/X-Windows, both of which I've been using since 2005 or so.
I've always used the standard GNU version rather than any specific Mac port. Over the years I'll have done some mix of downloading prebuilt binaries, building it from source, or getting the MacPorts version.
Perhaps I have missed out on some Fancy Extra Mac Stuff, the sort of thing that would come as standard with any project that took the platform seriously, but it's never really felt like a problem. And indeed, I figure if I'm happy enough with it running on X-Windows and on Windows, why wouldn't I be just as happy with exactly the same thing on macOS too? A consistent (or near enough) cross-platform experience is part of why I use Emacs anyway.
This isn't much of an argument, Don. Just being condescending may be charming somewhere else, but here it just looks like you're being a jerk -- and a jerk without much that's relevant to add to the conversation.
Do you really believe that RMS has suddenly done a 180 and changed his core beliefs and philosophy about Apple and Macs and non-free operating systems?
Do you even know him, have you ever talked with him about free software or copyleft, have you ever even read anything he's written? Are you brand new to this whole "free software" thing, and it's a total shock to you that RMS has a long standing opinion about supporting Macs and other non-free operating systems?
It's obvious you haven't read any of the links to evidence I posted, or even anything RMS has written about the subject, but you really should do some research before jumping to such historically uninformed conclusions.
Parading your self cultivated ignorance and unwillingness to read, enumerating things you don't care about, and refusing to indicate what I wrote that you disagree with or provide any evidence to the contrary after I asked you to, just isn't a good look, and won't win any arguments that I have nothing to add to the conversation.
One more time: what evidence I gave do you disagree with, and what evidence do you have than RMS has done a 180 and abandoned his long held principles? Do you even know what those principles are?
RMS is functionally irrelevant to the experience of someone on a Mac who wants to use emacs, because -- Again! -- all you have to do is download a build and you're off to the races.
That's the end of the discussion. It doesn't matter what RMS' position is. (And yes, I know what those are -- and no, I've never spoken to him, because I tend to avoid creeps.)
emacs is free software that, once released to the world, will find its way into many places perhaps its most famous proponent would prefer it not. And this happens because his opinion is irrelevant. This has happened before. This will happen again. RMS being a sad puppy about Macs and Windows doesn't change the fact that many, many folks have productive emacs-centered computing experiences on those platforms. He can die mad about it.
You posted a shitton of material, but none of it addressed the simple fact that using emacs on a Mac is approximately as easy as using it on (e.g.) Debian. There's no real difference for most use cases.
I'm not in the habit of taking homework from gish-galloping boomers hell bent on missing the point, so I'm not going to answer any of your questions. I will, however, note that I'm far from the only person in this thread looking at you and thinking "what the hell is this guy on about?"
Your litany of butthurt actually bolsters my opinion of the bozos at emacs-devel, who I've long criticized for hypocritically advancing emacs on proprietary os's despite their ostensible mission to destroy them.
You seem to think there is only one version of Emacs, and that its entire monolithic developer community is totally unified in its opinion and philosophy and mission, so you can accuse the entire community of being hypocritical if there is any dissent or diversity or competition.
I just wrote a long list of proprietary operating systems one version of Emacs ran on, and even linked to the source code proving it, which RMS opposes so vehemently that he calls it "Software Hoarder Emacs", and jokingly accuses its developers of burning his house down.
If you really think RMS's mission to destroy all non-free operating systems is "ostensible", you definitely don't know him or his reputation.
>ostensible /ɒˈstɛn(t)sɪbl/ adjective: stated or appearing to be true, but not necessarily so.
You're overcomplicating this. If RMS and his lackeys were so hellbent on ridding prop OS's from the world, they could move marginally closer to that goal by simply deleting w32* ns* and android* from GNU Emacs. That they instead collectively spend several man-months per year stressing about their upkeep means they care more about expanding their userbase than any bullshit notion of "freedom."
I've got another one for macOS. It's not as significant as what you listed, but it was extremely annoying for me.
When using homebrew, the default package for emacs is version 30. However, that version on macOS was compiled with an outdated tree-sitter version (v14). If one tries to install a tree-sitter parser for a particular language it will not work with emacs 29 or 30 on macOS (or at least not that I could figure out). I tried the D12Frosted version and some of the alternatives for macOS (I forget the names).
The current tree-sitter project is on v15+, so in order for it to work, one has to go through the commit histories for each language and find when the tree sitter's parser version was last compatible with v14. To my knowledge, this was not clearly listed in all the git commits in a nice clean manner.
One alleged workaround was to install everything via RedHat OS and move the installed parsers over to macOS since their version of emacs and the tree-sitter parsers are still compatible. However, I was not interested in doing this.
Interestingly enough, Neovim does not have this issue on macOS to my knowledge, but I could be wrong.
Now, this is not entirely an emacs issue, but it does introduce an interesting issue. If emacs has to be compiled with a particular tree-sitter version, then it makes things quite difficult to maintain. The maintainers apparently are discussing various options on how to handle this going forward, but there isn't a clear way to work around this.
Now, I do believe if one builds emacs from source, he or she can work around this issue to some degree, but I was also not interesting in doing this because one loses out on some of the nice features that the macOS focused emacs versions come with. I also did not want to install all the dependencies required to build from source since those dependencies are not something I have any other use for other than building emacs.
So, I just gave up on the tree-sitter. Though, I think emacs 31 has this fixed until it happens again, but I also encountered a lot of other bugs when trying other use it since it's a prerelease version anyway.
This was all months ago, so maybe things have changed. I haven't kept up. I can live without tree-sitter for the time being.
...you are a second class citizen in the emacs republic.
I mean, I don't endorse this position, but it's the way things are.