Irreal

Oh sweet summer child.

http://xahlee.info/emacs/misc/emacs_macos_emoji.html

Color emoji was deliberately disabled on macOS (2016): policy first, parity later. Emacs 25 turned off multicolor fonts on the Cocoa port even though they worked, with a NEWS note saying they’d be re-enabled "once it is also implemented in Emacs on free operating systems." This was widely read as a political parity requirement that penalized macOS users for years.

https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html

"Prefer GNU/GNU-Linux" development time: an explicit guideline. GNU’s own standards advise spending time on features "useful on GNU and GNU/Linux, rather than on supporting other incompatible systems." That guideline has often been cited in Emacs discussions to argue against platform-specific work that would land only on macOS.

https://irreal.org/blog/?p=13137

https://xenodium.com/emacs-send-to-aka-macos-sharing-merged-upstream

macOS-only features face extra process friction, or must be generalized. The "send-to" (macOS Sharing) patch was finally merged in 2025 -- but only after a lengthy debate and a rework into a cross-platform framework to satisfy GNU policy concerns about adding features that target a non-free OS first. (The end result is good! -- but the path illustrates the extra hurdles for macOS-first work.)

https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac

Long-running reliance on mac-specific forks to get a polished UX. For years, many mac users have depended on Mitsuharu…

I'd say the most satisfying experiences I have with lisp are a cross between clean abstractions and light code-golfing. To call out specific approaches, I'd highlight anaphoric macros, code-walking via (symbol-)macro-let [1], and the freedom to control when expressions evaluated (generally at read-time, compile-time, or run-time) for optimization [2][3].

[1]: https://letoverlambda.com/index.cl/guest/chap5.html#sec_

[2]: Compiler macro chapters aren't free, but I guess read-time is covered here https://letoverlambda.com/index.cl/guest/chap4.html#sec_1

[3]: https://irreal.org/blog/?p=809 / https://web.archive.org/web/20140711171755/symbo1ics.com/blog/?p=1352

> When I'm ssh'ed into one of my boxen, I can do a simple scp and have all my configs for IRC, eww, org-mode, EmacsWget, my custom scripts, etc, everything in one place and managed under one system ecosystem, and from a terminal without having to touch/forward X

And you don't even have to bother with that, thanks to TRAMP mode, which lets you open files on a local emacs from a remote system. You can even do it with sudo[1]!

I believe vim does have rudimentary sftp/scp support, but tramp can make it seem like a remote system is just an extension of your local system.

----
[1] http://irreal.org/blog/?p=895

Relevant to which processors go supports, is this section (1). Base x64 support includes SSE and SSE2. I don't know if the go compiler produces it, though. Unlike extremely complex compilers like gcc, where performance is the top priority, the go compiler favours simplicity in a Wirthian(2) fashion favouring a simple, fast compiler.

(1) https://go.dev/wiki/MinimumRequirements#amd64

(2) https://irreal.org/blog/?p=7075

https://smartgo.blog/2024/01/06/niklaus-wirth/

On Mac Os you can also add some other ones that are not enabled by default, there's various write ups on how to do this.

https://irreal.org/blog/?p=259

I really missed C-w for delete word personally.

There's also a vim plugin by tim pope that adds a few readline keys that don't clash.

https://github.com/tpope/vim-rsi

And if you use the fish shell you can have both vi and Emacs shortcuts activated at the same time for the best of both worlds.