Chris Wanstrath on The Setup

Or, you know, just Emacs in Terminal :)

(terminal emulator + screen + Emacs and a few other bits has worked for me these ten years and more, across multiple operating systems, and I don't mess with a good thing)

I like standard Emacs better than Aquamacs, too. I can see the appeal of Aquamacs to people who were Mac users first, and Emacs users later, but I'm the other way round. For my tastes, Aquamacs is trying a bit too hard to be Mac-like, and is just different enough from Emacs to be maddening to use. I used it for about a year and half before I switched to standard Emacs, and I'm much happier since. Bundling a bunch of apparently randomly-selected extra modes was the thing I liked least about Aquamacs, but there were lots of other irritating features, not to mention various incompatibilities with my familiar Emacs configuration.

For the past few months, I've been running Yamamoto Mitsuharu's experimental "Mac port" of standard Emacs. Probably the only way you'd know about it is if you read the emacs-dev mailing list. Mitsuharu-san has taken some of the best features of the old Carbon Emacs (which many people still run, apparently!), along with a few new ones, and ported them to Emacs 23 to make a hybrid Cocoa/Carbon app. Among the extra features are smoother scrolling, support for gestures on the Magic Trackpad/Magic Mouse, integration with Services on Mac OS X 10.6, and support for Emacs as the default mailer for mailto: links (yes!).

Mitsuharu-san's changes aren't yet integrated into mainline Emacs, but he publishes regular patches against it. He claims it's still an experimental port; however, I've only encountered one bug in the 5 or 6 months I've been using it, which he promptly fixed once I reported it. It's a pain to build, but if you use Homebrew, my emacs-mac-port branch on Github has support for it: just do

  brew install emacs --with-mac

https://github.com/dhess/homebrew/tree/emacs-mac-port

I think a smaller screen size is better for productivity. It keeps me focused on the task at hand since the screen size constrains what I can have on screen. With larger screens, there's too many other apps that can grab my attention.

In regards to coding, I also prefer the smaller size screen. Writing code on smaller screens forces me to write smaller methods since I don't want to scroll to read a method. Obviously, I could just resize my editor window to fix this, but then this exposes other applications which are distracting.