This assumes brew works on your machine. It doesn’t on older Macs.

cmckn · on Jan 28, 2022

As noted on the GNU emacs site[0], you can download prebuilt binaries here[1], if you really can’t be bothered with ‘make install’. Homebrew is hardly necessary (for most things.)

[0]: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/download.html

[1]: https://emacsformacosx.com/

sigjuice · on Jan 28, 2022

At least for me, homebrew emacs isn’t that useful. It is terminal-only.

jdminhbg · on Jan 28, 2022

There are taps that build GUI Emacs via homebrew, that's what I use. In particular, I use this one: https://github.com/d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus

tombert · on Jan 28, 2022

I think it was a "removing from future versions of macOS" situation, not removing from existing installs. If your mac is old enough to not have homebrew, it's probably too old to install Catalina due to the fact that they stopped supporting devices without Metal support.

Also, feel free to replace `brew install emacs` with the macports equivalent and the point still stands.

skybrian · on Jan 28, 2022

Well sure, there are alternatives. I was commenting on the casual assumption that everyone has brew. Brew has worse support for older Macs than a lot of other software.

lanstin · on Jan 28, 2022

And you can compile emacs from trunk or master or main or whatever from the GitHub mirror pretty easily.

robin_reala · on Jan 28, 2022

Tigerbrew has a python2 formula available back to 10.4: https://github.com/mistydemeo/tigerbrew/blob/master/Library/...

Wowfunhappy · on Jan 28, 2022

MacPorts works on OS X 10.4 Tiger and above. :)

mattl · on Jan 28, 2022

Are there any machines that support newer versions of the OS that don’t support Homebrew?

jcoder · on Jan 28, 2022

Surely you can cobble together a toolchain circa your old Mac and build from source?