I’m hoping the developers/maintainers will explain how they intend to treat compatibility with other versions of emacs, primarily the X11 and carbonized versions of gnuemacs.
Reading the PreferencesInAquamacs page and finding .emacs (deprecated in Aquamacs) caused me to wonder.
I use or have used /usr/bin/emacs, CarbonEmacs, and XEmacs. I have standard keybindings I want to use in all of them. There are some that are particular to XEmacs, and I can see that there might be some that would be particular to Aquamacs. I don’t mind separating them to editor specific files, but I do want to keep as many xxx.el files common as is possible. I hope Aquamacs isn’t going to make that difficult.
I certainly recognize the value in enabling Library/Preferences and Library/Application\ Support as places where customization and extension files can be placed, as there are many potential users who won’t be using the other emacsen and who are very comfortable with the MacOSX preference and support file locations. Let’s just not lose the compatibility with the others.
You should be able to keep all of your customized foo.el files. The only difference is that they should go in one of the designated directories instead of in .emacs. If you choose /Library/Application Support/Emacs, then these files will support all compatible carbonized Emacsen - right now that is just Aquamacs. If you choose /Library/Application Support/Aquamacs, then only Aquamacs will be supported.
It may not be possible to support X11 versions of Emacs with this method, however. --Kevin Walzer
If you want all Emacsen to load settings, then go for ~/.emacs as usual. This file will also be loaded by future Aquamacs versions. So while we don’t recommend using it for new installations - simply because it’s in the way in the home dir - it is supported.
With regards to the compatibility of your settings: I think there will always be some options that won’t work well on Aquamacs. That’s just the nature of Emacs packages and hacks - some aren’t compatible with each other. But Aquamacs tries to support a large variety of things. For example, over the last weeks I’ve been working with the developer of one of the packages that we use to enable color themes and random user customizations to default-frame-alist. --David Reitter
Note: This is not the place to get your questions answered. The Aquamacs website points out the appropriate mailing lists under “Support”! --DavidReitter