F.1 Basic Emacs usage under macOS and GNUstep
By default, the Alt and Option keys are the same as
Meta. The Mac Cmd key is the same as Super, and
Emacs provides a set of key bindings using this modifier key that mimic
other Mac / GNUstep applications (see Windowing System Events under macOS / GNUstep). You
can change these bindings in the usual way (see Customizing Key Bindings).
The modifiers themselves can be customized;
see Mac / GNUstep Customization.
S-mouse-1 adjusts the region to the click position,
just like mouse-3 ( mouse-save-then-kill); it does not pop
up a menu for changing the default face, as S-mouse-1 normally
does (see Text Scale). This change makes Emacs behave more like
other Mac / GNUstep applications.
When you open or save files using the menus, or using the
Cmd-o and Cmd-S bindings, Emacs uses graphical file
dialogs to read file names. However, if you use the regular Emacs key
sequences, such as C-x C-f, Emacs uses the minibuffer to read
file names.
On GNUstep, in an X-windows environment you need to use Cmd-c
instead of one of the C-w or M-w commands to transfer text
to the X primary selection; otherwise, Emacs will use the
clipboard selection. Likewise, Cmd-y (instead of C-y)
yanks from the X primary selection instead of the kill-ring or
clipboard.
F.1.1 Grabbing environment variables
Many programs which may run under Emacs, like latex or man, depend on the settings of environment variables. If Emacs is launched from the shell, it will automatically inherit these environment variables and its subprocesses will inherit them from it. But if Emacs is launched from the Finder it is not a descendant of any shell, so its environment variables haven’t been set, which often causes the subprocesses it launches to behave differently than they would when launched from the shell.
For the PATH and MANPATH variables, a system-wide method
of setting PATH is recommended on macOS, using the
/etc/paths files and the /etc/paths.d directory.