In April 2002, I merged my Mac OS X code with the development version of the Emacs source code maintained at the Emacs CVS repository. Since then, anyone who is interested in the lastest development version of Emacs for Mac OS X can obtain it by anonymous CVS. All of this Mac OS X code was original and written by myself, or adapted from my own port of Emacs 21 to Mac OS 8/9. Since then, Steven Tamm has contributed the make-package script and some code for event handling, and various fixes. Nozomu Ando has contributed fixes to unexmacosx.c, changes to build with the --with-x option (including the use of dynamic X11 libraries), and various fixes. A number of people have contributed various small fixes.

This latest version of Emacs for Mac OS X in the CVS repository contains many improvements and bug fixes that have been added since I released a patch for building Emacs 21.1 on Mac OS X in November 2001. It is continually being improved, although unfortunately we don't have many developers to work on it. I invite everyone to test and use the CVS version and update as often as possible to avoid discussing bugs on mailing lists that have already been fixed. Please note that although it is quite stable, this is a development version and you will need to put your own effort into finding out how to build, install, and use it.

Due to lack of time and resources, I cannot provide a binary distribution. I will try to provide a binary distribution when the Mac OS X code is part of a standard distribution of Emacs, which will probably be version 21.4. There may also be binaries of pretests of that version before then.

It is trivial to provide binary distributions of Emacs for Mac OS X on the Web by building the code from CVS using the mac/make-package script or constructing an application bundle using the method described in the FAQ. Unfortunately many people who do this on the Web do not update their binary distributions often enough, which causes users of these distributions to report problems that have long been fixed. Before you report a bug, you will help the developers a lot by testing on the latest version of the CVS code first.