Re: Setting up Emacs, AucTeX and (La)TeX on Mac OSX

[Pete Oster]

In article <Sv83a.2489$Vx2.229336@wards>, D. D. Brierton wrote:
> First questions: is it best (or necessary) to install the X server Apple
> recently released, or are there native Aqua builds of Emacs 

There's a nice native (carbon) build of fsf emacs 21.3.  I'm using it
to compose this followup.  See

  http://members.shaw.ca/akochoi-emacs/

There are prebuilt binaries of this around but I wouldn't recommend
using them.  Unless you want mine, which I'm happy to upload...



Installing Apple's X11 server and either xemacs 21.4 or an X11 fsf
emacs 21.2 is also a perfectly good option.  See:

   http://fink.sourceforge.net/

Fink is Debian-style package manager with osx/darwin ports of many
popular gnu packages.  Most, including xemacs 21.4, are available
prebuilt for osx 10.2


As for TeX, I've never used it.  But fink includes a number of what
seem to be LaTeX and TeTex-related packages.



> Next question: are there nice prebuilt binary packages which we can download
> and install, or do we need to build from source, and if so, does the
> bog-standard OSX install contain all the necessary developer tools?

See above.  If you use fink, you can probably download prebuilt
binaries.  


If you need to compile your own, you'll have to install Apple's
'Developer Tools'.  You'll also need this if you decide to build the
carbon emacs 21.3. The standard osx commercial package includes a Dev
Tools cd.  If you don't have that, you can download a Dev Tools disk
image for free from Apple.  But don't do it on a dialup connection...



> Last (for now): how similar are the standard install paths on OSX to Linux?
> Can I just make install auctex into /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp? And do
> whatever LaTeX macros she needs go into ~/texmf?

The fink system wants to stay out of Apple's way, so it installs
everything in /sw.  If you use fink, add /sw/bin and /sw/sbin to PATH.
If you want to build your own packages without fink, /usr/local is a
perfectly reasonable target.

I don't know LaTex at all but if you use fink's I'm sure it will
behave just as it does in any other unix.  If that means ~/texmf, the
same will apply in osx.




> If there is a better place to post ask this kind of thing (e.g. an Aqua/OSX
> for Linux users newsgroup) then please let me know.

Possibly comp.sys.mac.system.