Emacs El Capitain Visible Bell Fixed

The Emacs Visual Bell issue I previously wrote about has been fixed.

As I understand it, the issue was that the old NexTSTEP visible bell code accidentally depended on an object not getting garbage collected and that improved GC in El Capitan finally caught up with it.

The bell code has been complete reworked to use a NexTSTEP warning icon instead of flashing the screen. Since I last wrote about building Emacs on OS X, Emacs 25.0 has been moved into its own branch, emacs-25. The master branch is now Emacs 25.1 and this fix is not in master (yet?). (The current version is still 24.5, I presume the new branch is a step in releasing 25.0.)

That slightly changes the build instructions. After making sure Autoconf and Automake are installed, clone the Emacs source as always:

git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/emacs.git
cd emacs

or git pull if you already have it.

Then checkout the emacs-25 branch before building:

git checkout emacs-25
make configure
./configure --with-ns
make install

After which you can test with:

open nextstep/Emacs.app

or install by running:

open -R nextstep/Emacs.app

then dragging Emacs to the Applications folder.

I’ve been running 25.0.50 for about two weeks now with no issues. At first the warning icon was a bit jarring, but I’ve become accustom to it and it works for me.