I really didn't get on with aquamacs. It'll do your head in if you use emacs on other platforms.

You can use other emacs builds on mac OS. I use Carbon Emacs. Emacs 23 has a native cocoa build now.

The 23 Cocoa build is a bit broken, though:

http://atomized.org/2009/08/cocoa-emacs-231-cvs-builds-and-t...

I've since reverted to the Carbon Emacs 22 build (since I can't cope without fullscreen).

It's great, though, if you are used to Mac applications and learning Emacs for the first time. Kind of like training wheels for Emacs.

I used Aquamacs for 2-3 years but never really learned emacs until I swapped Aquamacs for Carbon Emacs and learned the real thing. Training wheels is a good analogy. You aren't really riding a bike if you use training wheels and they slow your progress in actually learning. Sure you can get to your friend's house, but you look like a dork.

I found the Emacs Starter Kit (http://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit/tree/master) and the Meet Emacs Peepcode Screencast (http://peepcode.com/products/meet-emacs) to be awesome. After a couple hours of working through the screencast, I was a 5x better Emacs user than I had been after 2+ years of Aquamacs use. You have to "get" Emacs and Aquamacs doesn't force you to do that. The $9 for the Peepcode screencast was the best money I've spent in a long time.

I use aquamacs at home on my Macintosh, and GNU emacs on Windows XP at work. I have switched back and forth between emacs and vi/vim over the last 25 years because they are both great editors and have various advantages and disadvantages. I had been using vim back when I was using Ubuntu at home because the fonts looked better on vim than on emacs. Now that I have a Macintosh and can run aquamacs, I switched back to the emacs world. I admit I'm a sucker for pretty text.