
Bye Bye Emojis: Emacs Hates MacOS - csmonk
http://www.lunaryorn.com/posts/bye-bye-emojis-emacs-hates-macos.html
======
jordigh
As one of GNU's flagship products, why shouldn't Emacs remind users that it is
not in agreement with Apple's treatment of its users? GNU has an agenda, just
like Apple does. Intel cripples icc for non-Intel CPUs, making it emit
pessimised assembler. Apple makes sure that its hardware only works with other
Apple products and that macOS can only be legally virtualised on Apple
hardware. Everyone has an agenda.

The difference is that GNU is a lot smaller and has a lot less power and
resources than Apple and Intel. So much that it is relatively easy and, in
fact, explicitly allowed by the GPL, for someone like Yamamoto to come along
and decide that, by golly, Emacs will have unique macOS-only features and
Apple deserves to have more money to do whatever it wants to its users because
its users enjoy Apple's treatment, smelly GNU/Beards be damned. This is a lot
easier than fixing icc for AMD CPUs or putting headphone jacks into iPhones 7.

> _We are not welcome, and never will be._

You are welcome. You are very welcome. Apple is not. You should not identify
yourself with Apple's operating system.

~~~
eridius
Deliberately crippling your product on Apple platforms does not in any way
"remind users that it is not in agreement with Apple's treatment of its
users". In fact, it's fairly ironic that, in an attempt to protest someone
else's treatment of users, Emacs has decided to treat its users badly.
Deliberately crippling Emacs will not make Apple change, and will not get
people to switch away from Apple platforms. But what it might do is get people
to switch away from Emacs.

~~~
pasquinelli
is removing multicolor font support crippling emacs?

~~~
rbanffy
I'd say it's a feature, not a bug. There is no place for colorful smileys in
my text files.

~~~
vurpo
Emojis are characters in the Unicode specification, which have glyphs in the
macOS default font, and are rendered by default in native macOS apps that
display text. Why should Emacs make the decision that most characters are okay
to display in their text editor, but _these specific characters_ are a no-no?

You're sounding like "I'm not using this feature, why does it even exist?". If
things worked like that, then everybody would be using Linux on all computers
today.

------
vilhelm_s
And several other Mac features were stopped before they made it into the
official release. This is Richard Stallman's policy: "GNU Emacs should never
offer people a practical reason to use some other system instead of GNU.
Therefore, when someone implements a useful new feature but only for a non-GNU
system, we do not accept it that form."

[https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-
devel/2015-12/msg01...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-
devel/2015-12/msg01407.html)

[https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-
devel/2015-12/msg01...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-
devel/2015-12/msg01572.html)

~~~
kitsunesoba
If the goal is to encourage people to use GNU software and potentially even
migrate to a full GNU system, I find this policy counterintuitive. It comes
off as needless and antagonistic and it pushes me further away from GNU and
towards free software that's not so tangled up in rigid philosophies, or
worse, proprietary software.

~~~
gutnor
> It comes off as needless and antagonistic

That's because that comes directly from the commercial companies rulebook.
Apple (for example) will not make an application that runs better on Android
or Windows than on one of its OS.

It would not be beside any of the big brand to remove something that was
working before just because that remove a tiny bit of interest in their own
platform. That makes cruel business sense ... and they are also hated for it
when it happens.

------
sjm
This kind of thing is exactly why I will always support and use Mitsuharu
Yamamoto's macOS Emacs port ([https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-
mac](https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac)), which has been consistently
rock solid and committed to implementing nice to haves on macOS that this sort
of political bullshit holds back on official development.

Homebrew tap here: [https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-
emacsmacport](https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport)

~~~
errx
he is the author of the commit
[http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?id=934461...](http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?id=9344612d3cd164317170b6189ec43175757e4231)

~~~
Arnavion
And the commit seems to be in emacs-mac too -
[https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-
mac/commits/9344612d3cd...](https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-
mac/commits/9344612d3cd164317170b6189ec43175757e4231) (Going by the author
date, it was in emacs-mac first.)

------
cyphar
> MacOS users we will always be second-class citizen in Emacs land3.

GNU Emacs is part of GNU/Linux. Why are you surprised that [other OS] is a
second-class citizen for a project which already has a clear OS target.

Besides, the guidelines for GNU packages clearly states that GNU packages
_cannot_ emphasise features of proprietary OSes. So it's not really the
maintainer's fault, it's one of the rules for GNU packages (you can blame the
FSF, but you've got to look at it from their perspective).

GNU packages are different from other projects, because they're actually part
of an OS. So they have an obligation to support the OS they're a part of more
than other operating systems (especially proprietary operating systems).

~~~
theparanoid
After using Emacs on Windows for years, including debugging graphics drivers,
the only OS with first class support is Linux.

~~~
pmiller2
You're lucky. I literally have never gotten Emacs to run properly on Windows.

------
burke
Here's the diff:

    
    
        -          /* Don't use a color bitmap font unless its family is
        -             explicitly specified.  */
        -          if ((sym_traits & kCTFontTraitColorGlyphs) && NILP (family))
        +          /* Don't use a color bitmap font until it is supported on
        +	     free platforms.  */
        +          if (sym_traits & kCTFontTraitColorGlyphs)
    

[https://github.com/emacs-
mirror/emacs/commit/9344612d3cd1643...](https://github.com/emacs-
mirror/emacs/commit/9344612d3cd164317170b6189ec43175757e4231?diff=unified)

------
failrate
As a product developer, maintaining a consistent feature set across OSes makes
perfect sense to me. It is a struggle to get consistent behavior across
different versions of Windows, let alone entirely different OS types.

~~~
kitsunesoba
Some level of consistency is absolutely desirable but I'm not sure that full-
on lowest common denominator is the right approach.

------
gkya
1) It's perfectly okay (and good) that GNU maintainers do not want to have
features that are needlessly exclusive to a given platform.

2) It's perfectly okay (and good) that they want their software to behave
consistently across platforms, as otherwise those are not really cross-
platform.

3) Coloured typeface are illogical, just use pictures, which is what emoji
are. It's fairly easy to insert images into a buffer in Emacs.

~~~
raverbashing
> It's fairly easy to insert images into a buffer in Emacs.

Sure and how it is represented in the underlying file? Is this platform
independent?

Emoji are just a part of Unicode. As far as I care, I wouldn't mind if Emacs
would just render it as [GRINNING FACE U+1f600]

~~~
grive
We're not talking about Emojis, but coloured typeface. Emojis are part of
Unicode, coloured typeface are not.

~~~
leni536
Typefaces are not part of Unicode, coloured or not.

~~~
gkya
Unicode is a list of glyphs, typefaces are sets of shapes which represent
glyphs. Emoji are pictures. Coloured glyphs in Unicode, which include emoji,
require compliant typefaces to include some shapes that have a preset colour,
and this is illogical, as colour is not the property of the shapes of a type,
but of the rendered text. This must stop before Mona Lisa makes it into the
Unicode.

------
astevens
20 years ago the FSF had some very forward-looking ideas. Now we have the
ornery opinion of old men - it was good enough for us two decades ago, it's
good enough for you now.

The point of free as in speech and not free as in beer is that the choice you
make does not need to be right or wrong by the standards of other humans.
Holding back technology because it's not available on "your" platform is just
as monopolistic as any corporate entity they have butted heads with.

~~~
icebraining
_The point of free as in speech and not free as in beer is that the choice you
make does not need to be right or wrong by the standards of other humans._

No, it may be yours, but I'm pretty sure that was never the FSF's point. Not
now, and not 20 years ago.

 _Holding back technology because it 's not available on "your" platform is
just as monopolistic as any corporate entity they have butted heads with._

\- It's not "their" platform, it's free platforms.

\- The tech is still available, it just won't be included in their official
release. Other MacOS ports are free to use it.

~~~
astevens
It's not the FSF's point to have freedom of ideas? Then please explain what
it's point is. You disagreed but haven't explained why.

If it's not "their" platform then how is it available elsewhere? If other
distributors have access and can make it available then it is very much a GNU
political standard and not a side effect the technology.

How are those platforms free if existing features have been removed due to
politics? I stand by my point, 20 years ago the FSF was a foundation that
wanted to make technology available to all - without having to worry about IP
ownership. They have removed a feature that was technically sound due to it's
status as a commercial work. How am I free to use this if I can only do so in
designated zones?

~~~
icebraining
_It 's not the FSF's point to have freedom of ideas?_

Freedom of ideas is supposed to be a given in a free society. The FSF
certainly supports it, but they weren't created for the purpose of promoting
it.

In any case, your initial statement was that "the choice you make does not
need to be right or wrong by the standards of other humans", which is actually
the opposite of the FSF's position, which is that some choices (like
developing, distributing or even promoting proprietary software) are unethical
and should be opposed. That's the definition of making a standard and holding
other humans to it.

 _If other distributors have access and can make it available then it is very
much a GNU political standard and not a side effect the technology._

I don't disagree. It's still not their platform, it's all platforms they
consider ethical.

 _How are those platforms free if existing features have been removed due to
politics? I stand by my point, 20 years ago the FSF was a foundation that
wanted to make technology available to all - without having to worry about IP
ownership. They have removed a feature that was technically sound due to it 's
status as a commercial work. How am I free to use this if I can only do so in
designated zones?_

I completely disagree with your portrayal of the FSF of 20 years ago. The
whole point of the creation of the GPL, instead of using the existing
permissive licenses, was to legally enforce the position that the Freedom of
the software, not its technical superiority, is the fundamental goal. This is
a markedly political position, and one which prevented the creation of many
features. Being "technically sound" was never enough to be considered good
software by the GNU project.

------
strangelove
,,Let’s sink this in: The Emacs developers deliberately disabled a feature
that was working perfectly fine for MacOS users just because it is not
available for free systems1. What a daft decision.''

\- well, right now, it's just bloating Emacs for the rest of the world. If one
needs it on MacOS, I'm sure it can be added it to a personal installation.

------
beefsack
It's easy to see this is but one side to the story from the level of emotion
in the blog post. Does anyone have more information regarding the decision
itself?

The post also misses the second half of the paragraph, which suggests a method
to get emoji working again:

    
    
      If some symbols, such as emoji, do not display, we suggest to install
      an appropriate font, such as Symbola; then they will be displayed,
      albeit without the color effects.

~~~
MBCook
So instead of using the native font rendering on OS X which they had actually
done, they suggest installing a secondary font which doesn't work as well to
fix the problem they created by disabling the working font rendering?

Yeah. I'm sure everyone's happy with that answer.

~~~
beefsack
You're being just as short-sighted as the blog author, do you know the
reasoning why it was removed in the first place?

It's fairly obvious the second part of the paragraph is a workaround, not a
fully fledged solution.

~~~
MBCook
I understand the reason why they did it. I understand your view of why it
should be done.

I'd be A LOT more sympathetic if they hadn't been shipping it working for two
years. At that point it's a little late to put the horse back in the barn.

Some of Stallmans list seems insane to me. They withheld accurate scrolling
until all the other platforms had it? They are crippling font rendering to the
lowest common denominator? They don't want background transparency on OS X
because what is ostensibly a console program doesn't have it on other OSs?

This is the kind of stuff that "free software" people do that turns off normal
people. I do understand some features. I can see why they wouldn't want to use
the system spellchecker if they didn't have a spellchecker on other platforms.
Very significant features like that that really could divide the platform
makes some sense to me.

But breaking font rendering? Making scrolling work worse? Not having some
generic cosmetic effects like background transparency? That seems way too
dogmatic.

Worse is that Stallmans email seems to imply that some of the things that they
held back on OS X should have been available for a while, but no one was
keeping track of when the free platforms caught up to parity. Does that mean
it's possible that OS X could have supported something to years ago, doesn't
have it today, but Linux has had it for a year? If you're going to impose a
rule like that you should be tracking it.

~~~
gshulegaard
I feel like there is some lost perspective here.

> But breaking font rendering?

I would instead see at is making font rendering work equally across platforms.

> Making scrolling work worse?

Again, making scrolling work equally across platforms.

> Not having some generic cosmetic effects like background transparency?

Again, equally.

I am more than a little surprised that this is so surprising to people...it
seems rather par for the course for GNU philosophy.

If you truly want to make a platform agnostic piece of software, then you end
up limiting yourself to the "lowest common denominator".

People seem to have gotten used to the presumption that if you want to make
software, you have to make platform specific versions for the best user
experience. Want to write a mobile application? Well the best user experience
comes from "native" apps...so you should make one specifically for iOS and
then one specifically for Android.

That. Is. A. Huge. Problem. (*at least in the eyes of GNU)

And in principle I agree most of the time. Locked/incentivized eco-systems
lead to the dominance of a few "popular" platforms as choosing which platforms
to support (as a developer) becomes a function of market coverage. This has
been demonstrated time and time again for better and for worse...although
usually the latter.

So yes, GNU can be kind of extreme into their adherence to their core
philosophies...but, honestly, I don't think this is a "fight" (so-to-speak)
that can be made with half measures and exceptions.

~~~
raverbashing
Isn't it funny how it is the Mac OS people implementing these changes while
the Linux people aren't coming up with equivalents?

And yes, you can have a transparent terminal on Linux, make emoji work, have
better scroll, etc

~~~
gshulegaard
As Mac OS has a corporate entity behind it I don't think it is too surprising
that Mac OS is in front...sort of.

> And yes, you can have a transparent terminal on Linux, make emoji work, have
> better scroll, etc

Well...sure, but it looks like all they did is remove the usage of Mac
specific APIs from mainline:

[https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-
devel/2016-01/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-
devel/2016-01/msg00389.html)

So they aren't so much sabotaging Emacs when it is on Mac, they are just
refusing to utilize platform specific APIs and tools. Again...see my first
comment.

------
znpy
> We are not welcome, and never will be.

It's quite silly that the the author of this post thinks non-free support was
a top priority for the free software foundation.

~~~
DocTomoe
Especially when the emacs homepage explicitly is anti-nonfree systems.

------
z3t4
You do have the freedom to change Emacs! You can fork it and create
"MacEmacs". You probably only have to change a few lines to get it working
again.

~~~
Freak_NL
Not even that; such a fork already exists (as mentioned elsewhere in this
thread).

------
dmitrygr
I wish there was a way to force other applications to disable color emjoi.

~~~
voaie
There is a special char to disable colorful emoji but seems no way to deal
with the font issue.

------
parenthephobia
FSF policy is that GNU software should not have features that will only work
on non-free operating systems. The decision to remove multicolor glyph support
was made on that basis.

The FSF don't want to make their software better on non-free operating systems
which, given their goals, doesn't seem particularly unreasonable to me.

------
confounded
Emojify[0] provides all the emoji support I seem to need on both Ubuntu and
macOS. It uses non-proprietary emojis though. If that's unacceptable, it can
take arbitrary directories for emojis[1].

I must say, Emacs still runs better on macOS than Xcode does on Linux.

[0]: [https://github.com/iqbalansari/emacs-
emojify](https://github.com/iqbalansari/emacs-emojify)

[1]: [https://github.com/iqbalansari/emacs-
emojify/issues/19](https://github.com/iqbalansari/emacs-emojify/issues/19)

~~~
NoGravitas
Seems to use EmojiOne, which is all the emoji you could need.

------
unescape
If you want to help adding multicolor fonts to free platforms:

[https://wiki.dequis.org/notes/emoji/](https://wiki.dequis.org/notes/emoji/)

[https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-
devel/2015-August/047175.h...](https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-
devel/2015-August/047175.html)

------
gok
"Therefore, when someone implements a useful new feature but only for a non-
GNU system, we do not accept it that form."

Users of non-GNU systems that use GNU software: the FSF is actively trying to
make your life more difficult.

~~~
jimmies
Just as if you don't agree with Apple, you are welcome to use the
alternatives. If you don't agree with GNU, you are welcome to use the
alternatives.

~~~
Annatar
That's exactly how this is going to go down, at least in my case.

~~~
gkya
Well if you'll switch away from Emacs because of coloured typeface, they
you're not using Emacs at all anyways, so farewell.

------
kalleboo
The last time Emacs came up here, there was some discussion about Stallmans
obsession with free OS purity and some separately-maintained macOS releases
were suggested
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12832486](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12832486)

------
Aardwolf
These multicolored fonts can cause problems. E.g. firefox on linux was at one
point rendering the unicode char "black right pointing triangle" as light blue
for me despite the font and text around it being black! Can be fun for some,
but not if you intend it to look like the text font! This character was in
unicode since 1993 long before emoji existed and now we can't even insert a
simple triangle in text without being certain it won't look ridiculous on some
people's screens.

[http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/25b6/index.htm](http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/25b6/index.htm)

------
Animats
Does anyone really need colored emoji in Emacs? It's a programmer's editor.

~~~
tragic
I can imagine having a debugger or repl open in an emacs buffer, which could
be printing out arbitrary strings, which could include emoji. Though non
coloured glyphs would be fine in that case.

Also, people use emacs for all kinds of crazy stuff, like IM and email and so
on ...

------
arthurfm
A colour emoji font is available for Linux [1][2] so it doesn't really make
any sense to disable the feature on macOS.

[1] [http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/03/enable-color-emoji-
linux-...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/03/enable-color-emoji-linux-svg-
font)

[2] [https://github.com/eosrei/emojione-color-
font/releases/](https://github.com/eosrei/emojione-color-font/releases/)

~~~
NoGravitas
There are actually a couple now. They currently only render in Gecko apps
(though apparently it's possible to get them working in Chromium apps now,
too). There's a bug filed in FreeType[0] to support SVG-in-OT fonts like this
one, but no implementation yet.

I believe that having this implemented in FreeType would be sufficient to get
it to work in GTK3 Emacs; not sure about plain X toolkits.

[0]:
[https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?46141](https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?46141)

------
digi_owl
And here i can't grok the appeal of emojis outside the tween girls segment...

~~~
alayne
Seems like they are generally popular:
[http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-
branding/infographic-...](http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-
branding/infographic-emojis-are-becoming-preferred-communication-tool-across-
demographics-167355)

~~~
digi_owl
Once more i find myself worried about the "positive" feedback loop found in
mass media, marketing, and popular culture...

~~~
CmdrSprinkles
Get off the high horse

Different people like different things. 1337-speak and obscene levels of
abbreviation largely came into being as SMS and text in-game chat were popular
because, for a lot of people, spelling out words was much slower (or costly).
The former mostly faded whereas the latter is still useful for twitter and
people who actually still do SMS due to restrictions

Emoji (and emoticons before them) are similar. It is a way to convey an
emotion or have a bit of fun in a concise manner. Some people like to type
"That is hilarious". Others will type "LMFAO". And others still will put a
pacman that is laughing. All convey the same message just in a different way.

------
bArray
Forget GNU making a point, maintenance wise having several versions of your
program with several different features could easily become hell. As these
coloured smilies grow additional features, get bugs, etc - Emacs for OSX
begins to fork. You then have divided developer time, with typically one fork
eventually dying due to lack of funds.

Apple users: Take the temporary pain to protect your future.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
I started poking around the emacs mailing list archives looking for drama, and
found some messages from this month from RMS getting nervous about the idea of
removing support for windows 9x.

~~~
bArray
That's great! Have you got a link?

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
[https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-
devel/2016-11/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-
devel/2016-11/msg00193.html) [https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-
devel/2016-11/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-
devel/2016-11/msg00229.html)

~~~
bArray
From what I read, they may look at removing support based on user agent
strings which is a terrible idea. Many websites don't support browsers outside
of Firefox, MS, Chrome and Safari recent releases, which is why people often
hard code their user agent string.

Still, it's great to see them take their user base so seriously!

------
rbanffy
Feature parity across platforms makes it easier to develop and debug by
removing platform-specific corner cases (of which there are already quite
enough in Emacs). My init.el makes decisions based on which windowing system
(if any) it's running on because some features work and some don't depending
on the machine I'm on. I wish it didn't have to.

------
nibbula
Can you say: “U+1f4a9 U+1f32a”?

Those of you complaining about RMS's curmudgeonly demeanor, perhaps you would
rather be using Apple iEmacs™ and “Microsoft Visual Emacs 2013”, with about
the same freedom as you have with macOS / iOS, Android, TiVo, etc., which
would play about as well together as ntfs on mac and hfs+ on linux? (or maybe
that alternate universe would be Google Mosaic on FranklinOS?). While you're
at it, you should thank the couterpointedly curmudgeonly jwz that Emacs is not
tty only, and you have at least one viable non-corporate(-ish) browser choice.

Or you could just run emacs in your iTerm. Or you could get all the big
software pimps (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, and maybe the W3C) to agree
on a good (please not bitmaped) format, then patch Freetype, again. But I
really hope it's already being worked on? I'm sure Emacs will work with it
then.

------
pawadu
My immediate reactions after reading this:

1\. Why would you even WANT this?

2\. Find this unacceptable? Then recall what Apple did to Logic and Final Cut
Pro users on Windows.

------
nephrite
I wish all emojis just disappeared. They're stupid, don't add any value, waste
unicode space and developers' time.

~~~
Freak_NL
> waste unicode space

The desirability of emoji aside, Unicode has plenty of space for this. The
bulk of Unicode code points are CJKV (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and
Vietnamese ideographs) characters. Compared to that, a few emoji outside of
the BMP don't really amount to much.

In fact, I am under the impression that the popularity of emoji had an
unintended benefit. It seems to have contributed to a much better support of
non-BMP¹ Unicode characters across the board. Until the extended emoji set
came along, most characters outside of the BMP where fairly specialistic or
extremely regional, so bugs didn't show up as fast as they do now. It used to
be a tiny miracle of you managed to view a PDF containing non-BMP characters
properly, nowadays that is just how things work.

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(Unicode)#Basic_Multilin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_\(Unicode\)#Basic_Multilingual_Plane)

------
_ph_
It is a strange interpretation of freedom, if you are free to run the software
how you want, except if RMS disapproves your OS. I think this way of
"defending free software" is rather counterproductive. I say this as a strong
supporter of free and open source software and both a Mac and Linux user. I
want Linux or any other free operation system to be strong in the market. But
this should be reached on features and capabilities, not on limiting software
on other operation systems. Fortunately thanks to its open source nature, it
should be possible to maintain a branch of Emacs for the Mac which keeps this
feature alive. This is where open source is strong.

~~~
crististm
Yet RMS disapproval of MAC OS does not make Free software less free. The
fundamental rights of free software are still preserved:

"the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and
improve the software"

~~~
_ph_
Yes, those rights are not limited. Still I find it a strange thing, that
working features are removed, because they affect only "disapproved" operating
systems. I don't like it, if technical questions and political ideas are too
strongly mixed.

------
pif
Just ask your money back!

------
waynecochran
Emacs-Gud Will never support llvmdb either... sad...

~~~
__david__
Not true. They've repeatedly said they will happily accept patches for lldb.
There was a thread on the devel email list just a week or 2 ago. No one has
stepped up yet.

------
qwertyuiop924
Get off your high horse, Richard: In fighting software that restricts its
users and doesn't respect their freedoms, you've become the thing you despise.

Oh, and the rest of the Emacs team: Don't think you're getting away with this,
either: it's despicable.

I may well actually work on exporting the GCC AST in protest.

~~~
cyphar
> In fighting software that restricts its users and doesn't respect their
> freedoms, you've become the thing you despise.

GNU Emacs is still under the GPL. Feel free to modify it to re-add the feature
that was removed. The only reason you have the freedom to do that is because
of Richard Stallman's "high horse".

> Oh, and the rest of the Emacs team:

Reminder that GNU Emacs is part of GNU/Linux, and thus features are developed
against GNU/Linux first and other operating systems later. In addition, it is
part of the requirements of GNU packages that they not encourage users to use
proprietary operating systems. This includes having features on proprietary
operating systems that do not exist on free operating systems.

Surely you see why that's important, right?

> I may well actually work on exporting the GCC AST in protest.

Have fun using the freedoms that the GPL grants you while protesting against
the movement that caused free software to exist in the first place. Hypocrisy
is so much fun.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
>Reminder that GNU Emacs is part of GNU/Linux, and thus features are developed
against GNU/Linux first and other operating systems later.

Yes, but that's terrible. Making your software demonstrably worse for a subset
of your users isn't acceptable. If any other group did this, you'd likely be
enraged. What if .NET Core dropped support for an API on Linux? Would you
really be comforted by the people saying: "it's open source: fork it if you
want the features back"?

>Have fun using the freedoms that the GPL grants you while protesting against
the movement that caused free software to exist in the first place. Hypocrisy
is so much fun.

I have no wish to protest GNU as a whole. I do wish to protest the pig-
headedness of RMS and others, which keeps us from actually moving Emacs and
other packages forward. Not allowing Emacs to touch the GCC AST isn't
protecting freedoms: it's needlessly obstructive, and utterly pointless.

It's the same situation here: not patching in functionality until there's
cross-platform support? Okay. Actively removing functionality that doesn't
work cross-platform (yet)? Not cool.

~~~
cyphar
> Making your software demonstrably worse for a subset of your users isn't
> acceptable.

Which is why they removed a feature after realising it made GNU/Linux users
have a worse experience than on other platforms.

> What if .NET Core dropped support for an API on Linux? Would you really be
> comforted by the people saying: "it's open source: fork it if you want the
> features back"?

Yes, because I guarantee that someone would fork it. Just like someone already
has a fork of Emacs that is macOS-friendly. And it probably already has the
patch reverted.

> Actively removing functionality that doesn't work cross-platform (yet)? Not
> cool.

It was a mistake for them to merge it, and they're fixing their mistake.
That's how I see it. GNU packages have to be "portable to GNU", specifically
all of their features have to be portable to GNU. A feature which is not
portable to GNU is not a feature that the package should have -- otherwise
you're both encouraging people to use proprietary operating systems as well as
fragmenting your userbase.

------
no_protocol
Can you just recompile it with that feature enabled?

~~~
noobermin
Probably not. I won't be surprised if someone doesn't add a patch though. From
NEWS:

    
    
       On the OS X Cocoa ("Nextstep") port, multicolor font (such as color
       emoji) display is disabled.  This feature was accidentally added when
       Emacs 24.4 included the new Core Text based font backend code that was
       originally implemented for a non-mainline port.  This will be enabled
       again once it is also implemented in Emacs on free operating systems.
       If some symbols, such as emoji, do not display, we suggest to install
       an appropriate font, such as Symbola; then they will be displayed,
       albeit without the color effects.
    

IMO: this is the least important thing of this week to me. It certainly
doesn't deserve the "Emacs Hate MacOS" subtitle.

~~~
MBCook
If you've been shipping a feature for two years it's a little too late to pull
it and say "oops we didn't mean to give you that yet".

------
laughingman123
For all those who constantly whine against decisions of RMS, you can atleast
go start a fork of emacs if you wanted. Unlike macOS which is commercial jail
, you have to beg for years for any bug fix/feature you want, and even then it
won't be implemented.

Someone has to be ideologically pure, in a world of jailed software.

------
imjustsaying
delete (this comment)

~~~
noobermin
This is probably a hint that the title can be reworked.

------
disposablezero
atom probably has emacs emulation

------
DonHopkins
Emacs has gone downhill ever since RMS removed this emoji from the ultra-hot
screen management package source code.

[http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/skull-and-
crossbone...](http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/skull-and-
crossbones.txt)

------
bitmadness
Absolutely sickening.. Stallman needs to leave the crib and join the real
world.

