Shiny New iMac
Tuji starts to use iMac!!! Obviously it is not sitting on his desk for show or as a clunky paper weight. Tuji has never used MacOS for any extended period of time. He felt excited.
The mouse is novel. One can rub on it to scroll pages and two-finger side-way scroll switches desktops. Tuji is still clumsy with two-finger side-way scrolls. :(
Then the system decided to upgrade. Tuji let it and read about shortcuts on MacOS while waiting. It seems that the command key is like the new control key while the control key is like the old-fashioned control key. What Tuji means is best illustrated by examples. cmd-x, cmd-c and cmd-v are cut, copy and paste respectively. ctrl-a and ctrl-e are move-to-beginning-of-line and move-to-end-of-line respectively.
Then Tuji tried to get Emacs installed. Without root power, installation was a pain in the ass. There was no way to lug the Emacs.app into Applications. The file system looks like that of Linux except that there are a bunch of folders with unabbreviated long names which are properly capitalised! Well, Tuji will just stick to his /Users/tuji home folder. The /home folder is empty?!
After making himself a sudoer, whatever the name it is with MacOS, Tuji continued to install Emacs. Now that Tuji had the sudo power, Tuji installed Homebrew for the future. Then Emacs was just a
brew cask install emacs
away. The net effect seemed to be downloading the binary from the Emacs for MacOS site and dropping it into /Applications. The site looked like a promotion of whatever.
When Tuji copied his Emacs init file over and tried to install the missing packages, he was irked by the unreachable meta key which by default is bound to the options key. Sorry, thumb is not agile enough. Yeah, Tuji is one of those that uses pinky for control key and thumb for meta key. (He was trying to type M-x p-l-p, of course.) Thus he customised the ns group and set mac-command-modifier to meta and mac-alternate-modifier to super, which basically exchanged the two keys. What does super do anyway? How is it different from hyper?
Now it is time to M-x p-l-p and enjoy the exhilaration of muscle memory carrying out all the work. Tuji installed AucTeX obviously and auto-complete, use-package, bind-key, which-key, browse-kill-ring and paredit. Then Emacs no longer raised questions with the init file which had some parts removed.
It is time to write a LaTeX file! Step One: install MacTeX. OMG, this monster is over 3G!? Isn't it going to take ages to download? It turned out that Tuji completely underestimated the speed of his link. Download concluded in about a minute. Tuji had been stuck with 20k/sec for too long. ;_; How sad...
After installation of MacTeX... guess what went wrong. AucTeX complained that it could not locate a LaTeX installation. Somehow the terminal and Emacs do not receive the same PATH variable. WTF? Just add-to-list the directory of the LaTeX installation to the exec-path in the init file. Tuji also adjusted the PATH variable inside Emacs.
Finally the test LaTeX file compiled.