Appendix D. Emacs and the Mac OS

Table of Contents
D.1. Keyboard Input on the Mac
D.2. International Character Set Support on the Mac
D.3. Environment Variables and Command Line Arguments.
D.4. Volumes and Directories on the Mac
D.5. Specifying Fonts on the Mac
D.6. Mac-Specific Lisp Functions

Emacs built on the Mac OS supports many of its major features: multiple frames, colors, scroll bars, menu bars, use of the mouse, fontsets, international characters, input methods, coding systems, and synchronous subprocesses (call-process). Much of this works in the same way as on other platforms and is therefore documented in the rest of this manual. This section describes the peculiarities of using Emacs under the Mac OS.

The following features of Emacs are not yet supported on the Mac: unexec (dump-emacs), asynchronous subprocesses (start-process), and networking (open-network-connection). As a result, packages such as Gnus, Ispell, and Comint do not work.

Since external Unix programs to handle commands such as print-buffer and diff are not available on the Mac OS, they are not supported in the Mac OS version.