In a previous post I mentioned that I upgraded my homebrew install of Emacs after Emacs 26.2 was released, and noticed that I had lost its GUI functionality. That’s a pretty serious restriction for me as I usually end up with multiple frames across my desktop. I did end up installing the homebrew Emacs for Mac tap which restored the GUI functionality. It had have one niggling problem for me, though. My muscle memory says that I use Shift-Meta-7 (aka Meta-/ ) for keyword expansion as I use a German keyboard layout most of the time. Unfortunately, with Meta mapped to the Apple Command key, Shift-Meta-7 is a menu shortcut. Instead of expanding keywords, I kept opening menus. That clearly wouldn’t do.

Malcolm Purvis had been kind enough to point out in a comment to my original homebrew Emacs post that Davide Restivo had created a brew tap that brings the necessary –with-cocoa build option back. He just upgraded it to Emacs 26.2, so this morning I rebuild my Emacs on OSX again and ended up where I wanted to be, with the latest version of Emacs, keyword expansion as I expected it to work, and a working GUI. Thanks, Davide!

And yes, it might come across as silly to rebuilding the editor just to get my preferred key combination back. It probably is - after all, I could’ve just remapped the key combination in my .emacs. I tend to run Emacs across a myriad of platforms (Linux, OSX, Windows, FreeBSD to just list a few) and having a “stock” Emacs experience on all of these platforms means that my .emacs has only a minimal amount of OS-based conditionals in it. For example, it has the following OS X specific combo:

;; On OS X/Darwin, make sure we add the path to the homebrew installs
(when (string-equal system-type "darwin")
  (setq exec-path (append exec-path '("/usr/local/bin")))
  (global-set-key [home] 'move-beginning-of-line)
  (global-set-key [end] 'move-end-of-line))

In fact, the above block is the only OS-specific configuration in my whole .emacs file. I’d like to keep it that way.