In a previous post I mentioned that I upgraded my homebrew install of Emacs after Emacs 26.2 was released, and noticed that I had lost its GUI functionality. That’s a pretty serious restriction for me as I usually end up with multiple frames across my desktop. I did end up installing the homebrew Emacs for Mac tap which restored the GUI functionality. It had have one niggling problem for me, though. My muscle memory says that I use Shift-Meta-7 (aka Meta-/ ) for keyword expansion as I use a German keyboard layout most of the time. Unfortunately, with Meta mapped to the Apple Command key, Shift-Meta-7 is a menu shortcut. Instead of expanding keywords, I kept opening menus. That clearly wouldn’t do.

I finally got around to upgrading my OS X installation from Mojave to High Sierra - my OS update schedule is usually based on the old pilot wisdom of “don’t fly the A model of anything”. As part of the upgrade, I ended up reinstalling all homebrew packages including Emacs to make sure I was all up to date. That proved to be a big mistake as I suddenly had a GUI-less Emacs. Of course I found the post on Irreal about the Emacs homebrew package being broken on Mojave after, well, I noticed that my Emacs GUI wasn’t working. Oops.

Update 2019-05-07: The java8 cask is affected by recent licensing changes by Oracle. There’s a discussion over on github about this. I’m leaving the post up partially for historic context, but the java8 cask is no longer available, at least at the time of writing.

In an earlier post, I described how to install the latest version of the Oracle Java JDK using homebrew. What hadn’t been completely obvious to me when I wrote the original blog post is that the ‘java’ cask will install the latest major version of the JDK. As a result, when I upgraded my JDK install today, I ended up with an upgrade from Java 8 to Java 9. On my personal machine that’s not a problem, but what if I wanted to stick with a specific major version  of Java?

Update II - 2019-05-07: It looks like due to the recent licensing changes, the Java 8 JDK that brew used is not directly accessible anymore and likely behind some kind of paywall. The installation method described below will still work as it uses the non-versioned java cask, which installs the latest version of OpenJDK.

_Update: The title of this post isn’t quite correct as using the homebrew cask mentioned in this blog post will install the current major version of the Oracle JDK. If you want to install a specific major version of the JDK (6 or 8 at the time of writing), I describe how to do that in this new blog post.

I’ve recently switched to using homebrew as my source for Emacs on OS X  after seeing this blog post by Philip Ingram.

It’s a simple way to install a current Emacs once or twice a year. I don’t use beta versions or other pre-release versions, only released versions. My editor is too important a tool for me to risk using pre-release versions.