Carbon Emacs acts like emacsclient or gnuserv by itself, i.e. it only runs one instance and opens files in this instance from Finder automatically.

A drawback of this behaviour is that the usual server-window variable of gnuserv has no effect. When using elscreen to get tabs into Emacs the desired behaviour might be to open a new tab in the running Emacs when you open a file from Finder. This can easily be done, using my intelligent-kill command (see my elscreen posting) such that files from Finder are opened in a new tab, and you can close this tab with the usual C-x C-c:

That’s really good news:

Was looking for another terminal app some time ago, but didn’t find anything which properly integrates into OSX and is fast enough. So another reason to look forward to Leopard in march.

With MacOSX the Finder and the BSD/fink subsystem have a different understanding what an application really is. If you want to launch for example “gv” from Firefox to view postscript files, it is not enough to select /sw/bin/gv in the Firefox open dialog. What you have to do, is to create an .app bundle from a fink shell script. Platypus makes that quite easy:

• Installl and launch Platypus
• Set intepreter to /bin/sh
• Click on the “New” button below the “Script Path”.
• Click on “Edit” and write something like:

It’s important that you write it, not only copy it from here. Copy&paste creates ^M (DOS like?) line ending such that the script is not runnable afterwards.

• Select “Is droppable”
• Change the “App Name” to something sensible, e.g. “gv”
• Click on “Create”
• Store the gv.app in ~/Applications.

Now you can open a postscript file in Firefox and select the new gv.app in the “Open with” dialog. Voila: “shell applications” in your Mac programs.

The claim of Apple’s Quartz Extreme:

… and the truth of high quality scaling — well bilinear scaling looks different, doesn’t it?

Yes, it does, look here:

How deep can a chat application be in the system to require a full reboot after an update?

For those poor souls which look for information about KBounce on MacOSX: it already works fine, just by using the X version which is inside Fink. Look here. There is just no binary package yet. So you have to do fink -b install kbounce and then be prepared for around two hours of compiling, mainly Qt, kdelibs, kdegames and so on. At the end you get this:

A very nice KDE application in X inside OSX