[OS X Emacs] [aquamacs-devel] Stepping Down as Aquamacs Maintainer

[Win Treese]

I'd also like to thank David for creating Aquamacs and keeping it going all this time. I've found it to be an essential tool in my own work.

As David said, I've volunteered to manage getting Aquamacs 3.6 done. David did an amazing amount of work on all the parts of the project, from working on the code to running the email lists, the web site, and more. Many of you have helped out with things along the way, and I'm hoping that several people will volunteer to help out with the various things that need doing. I'll be sending out an email about that shortly.

If you're wondering, here are a few thoughts about continuing Aquamacs development.

The goals of Aquamacs will remain to provide a Mac distribution of Emacs that behaves as much like a Mac app as possible while remaining true to what Emacs does, and to provide a good out-of-the-box experience for Emacs users of any level of experience.

Of course, I’m very interested to hear your collective thoughts on how Aquamacs should evolve. While that discussion gets going,  I expect that the continuing work on Aquamacs will proceed on two tracks:

1. Bug fixing and minor changes to 3.5, possibly including new feature suggestions

2. Moving Aquamacs forward to Emacs 26, with an eye to getting to Emacs 27 soon after it stabilizes. GNU Emacs on the Mac has itself come a long way since 2004, and this is a good opportunity to revisit how the pieces go together.

If the work in #1 accumulates enough of interest, it may turn into 3.6. Or maybe the Emacs 26 version will be it--we'll see how it goes.

A little on my own Emacs background, for what it's worth: I've been in the software world for a very long time, in startups, research, consulting, and academia. I've also been using Emacs in one version or another since 1983, and GNU Emacs since version 17 was released in 1985. When I switched to the Mac in 2004, I went looking for Emacs on it, and found Aquamacs--apparently, as I just learned, shortly after David first released it. As many of you have, I helped out a little along the way, the biggest piece being working out the GNUTLS bundling in 3.5.

With your help, we can continue to make Aquamacs a useful and powerful tool.

Best,
Win Treese
treese at acm.org
Aquamacs maintainer