Emacs on Mac OS X ·
It turns out that there is a perfectly good version of GNU Emacs for the
Mac OS X.
When I first climbed on board OS X, I was frightened of downloading and
building software, so I cast about and found a place to grab a binary
version.
It turns out to be not too bad.
I'd put in pointers for the central GNU Emacs page and the current page of
the guy who's co-ordinating the OS X work, but the GNU people are pretty
slack about their Web presence, and the OS X stuff page currently starts with
http://members.shaw.ca/, so it's probably better to track the
right place down with a decent search engine.
Anyhow, find a place with instructions for download, download, type
make and prepare to wait a long, long time.
There's a subdirectory called mac that has some other useful
stuff; for example, you look in there to figure out how to run emacs as a
standalone GUI app rather than in your terminal.
Go for it!
And if you don't know about Emacs, well... it's got a bit of steep learning curve, but if you're doing some serious text editing, it's the most heavily overengineered power tool on the planet. It really has only two serious competitors: one is Vi, the default Unix text editor (originally the work of Bill Joy), which is much less powerful and sophisticated, but lets you accomplish most things with many fewer keystrokes. The second is Microsoft Word.
