Aquamacs continues to be my emacs distribution of choice, mostly because it manages to behave both like an OS X application and like emacs.
The only inconsistency I discovered was with Undo: Aquamacs uses redo.el, which removes the emacs undo function and installs more familiar, but less powerful undo/redo functions in its place. Since redo.el clobbers the original undo function, I couldn’t adjust the keybindings myself without hacking Aquamacs distributed files, so I sent a whiney bug report.
24 hours and a short email back-and-forth later (choice quote: “You are the first to complain, but that doesn’t mean you’re not right.”), the nightly builds don’t clobber undo any more, C-/ and C-_ use emacs undo and undo/redo is available via Cmd-Z/Cmd-S-Z and the pull-down menu.
This is a good example of what I understand to be the general design philosophy of Aquamacs: offer emacs functions where an emacs user expects to find them, offer Mac-like functionality where a Mac user looks. And its developer, David Reitter, is very responsive and friendly indeed.
I was also initially annoyed by that very thing, made the changes myself inside the .app and had them lost on upgrades for several occasions so eventually I just gave up (I hadn’t yet learned to backup the old app bundle prior to upgrading). Today I happened to make a google search, found your blog, immediately downloaded a nigthly build and man, am I happy now! Thank you, and of course thank you aquamacs developers, too. I do hope the nightly is stable enough to keep me satisfied.
Nice to see that bug reports do make a difference in some projects – I myself am often too cynical to actually submit bug reports..