How can I install an X11 version of Emacs on MacOS Catalina?

Question

I'd like to install an X11 version of Emacs on Catalina, but haven't found anything online that tells me how I might accomplish this.

The following worked for some previous versions of MacOS, including, I believe Mojave.

$ brew tap d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus
$ brew install /emacs-plus --with-x11

Unfortunately, at the moment, if you do this, you get only the "app" version of Emacs, not the X11 version.

The default Emacs recipe that comes with Homebrew does not currently support the "--with-x11" or "--with-x" option.

Is there another Emacs cask somewhere that supports X11?

PS I know that I could try to build Emacs directly from the Emacs sources myself, but from past experience, I am afraid that there be dragons along this path.

PPS I seem to have gotten a working version of an X11 emacs installed by rsyncing the directory /usr/local/Cellar/emacs over from a Mac that is running Mojave. But clearly this is less than ideal, so I'm still looking for how I might accomplish this the "right" way.

Answer 1

This isn't really a programming question -- probably better for serverfault.com or unix.stackexchange.com, but I'll post this reply here anyway.

My last attempts to try to use homebrew to install X11 capable apps, especially Emacs, failed. Once upon a time I had edited the homebrew recipe to make it compile a local version with X11 support, but I was giving up on maintaining that against the quickly moving target of homebrew and the mass migration of homebrew away from supporting X11.

So, really your best option is to build Emacs from source and install it.

(I've moved entirely away from homebrew as a result -- I only use pkgsrc now, and that gives one an easy way to reliably build Emacs with X11 support and manage all the dependencies, etc.)

Answer 2

I maintain my own brew formula for X11 emacs that you may be able to use. I wrote about this in a blog entry here .