I’ll show you how to start using Emacs in the easiest way.

My environment

• macOSX 15.1
• Intel chip
• 32 GB RAM

How to use

We can use Emacs on macOSX by default by running emacs command on terminal:

% which emacs
/usr/local/bin/emacs

The Emacs located at /usr/local/bin/emacs is CUI-version, but It is the CUI version, but this article will show you how to obtain the GUI one; I prefer it because it looks beautiful and has a lot of features.

Although there’s many ways to obtain Emacs, I’ll show you the easiest way ── download a ready-made binary ── so you don’t have to do anything like programming.

1. Get binary and install it

Visit emacsformacosx.com and download a binary you prefer.

I downloaded v30.0.92 (pretest).

Install Emacs as you would normally install Mac apps manually. Your Emacs will be installed as /Applications/Emacs .

2. Launch Emacs

The startup buffer will quickly show up when you launch Emacs.

3. Confirm the config directory is created

Although it may seem insignificant, the most important part of this article is this: you can see a new directory named .emacs.d is created on your home.

% ls -al ~/ | grep .emacs.d
drwx------@    3 ahayashi  staff      96 Dec  4 04:46 .emacs.d

After the next post, we will add configuration files under this directory to improve Emacs to fit to our hand.