I've come across this before and it's pretty much correct: using Emacs Lisp as a scripting language can give a huge 'bang for the buck' when automating some existing Emacs feature/application.

For any other task? Definitely avoid ELisp and go for a more 'mainstream' language.

(In fact, I'm currently writing some ELisp scripts to automate ProofGeneral; reading HN while the test suite runs ;) )

I stopped reading at '"real" Emacs is typically installed via Homebrew at /usr/local/bin/emacs'.

Err, to be fair the context was that OS X usually has a very outdated version of Emacs. (Don't have a Mac so dunno for sure if that's still the case or if the article is out of date.)

On Yosemite 10.10.3, the emacs version is 22.1.1.

That's the emacs that comes with the BSD OS.

You can download and install 24.5-1 at http://emacsformacosx.com/ without having to use homebrew.

So it's really ancient: 22.1 was released in 2007.

I've installed through homebrew and the version says

GNU Emacs 24.5.1 (x86_64-apple-darwin14.3.0, NS apple-appkit-1347.57) of 2015-04-13 on mymachine

Yes the version @ http://emacsformacosx.com/ is much better.

Gotta throw in a pitch for the Japanese Cocoa-native Emacs port: https://github.com/railwaycat/emacs-mac-port

Running this with Spacemacs is... well, surprisingly pleasant. Unicode, pixel level scrolling, image support that isn't totally broken, it's...nice.

Why?

What is the difference between that and brew install emacs --cocoa?