I understand what the Aquamacs people are doing, but I think it's a big mistake. What makes Emacs so useful is not adherence to platform standards, but that it is a Lisp runtime with a lot of highly specialized text manipulation primitives that people have been hacking on for years.
It's an autarky wherever it runs, so let it be. I'm as big a proponent of the Macengeist (or whatever you want to call the ineffable quality that makes a good Macintosh application) as anyone I know, but Emacs is it's own world. Best to use straightforward Emacs 23 or 24 as a portal into that world, rather than trying to shoehorn alien concepts into it.
Now, building it on OS X can be a PITA -- not that it's not fully supported, but some stuff could be in better locations than the hated /usr/local. But that's an argument against myself that I'd prefer not to have at this exact moment.
You don't have to build emacs to get a modern version without all the Aquamacs hoo-ha. I've been using the build at http://emacsformacosx.com/ ever since carbon emacs was discontinued. It's a nice, no surprises build.
No, I was more referring to how you have to override a bunch of environment variables in the build and do some edits to Makefile.in to prevent irritating warnings about non-existent directories when you build it yourself. There's nothing wrong at all about http://emacsformacosx.com.
/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs -nw works fine for me. (Running OS X 10.7.1 with Emacs 23.3.1 I compiled when it came out on OS X 10.6.something.)
You might find this useful; you might find it laughable. On my i7 15" MBP it's about ten minutes start to finish, so I usually build first thing in the morning while I'm brewing my coffee.
It's an autarky wherever it runs, so let it be. I'm as big a proponent of the Macengeist (or whatever you want to call the ineffable quality that makes a good Macintosh application) as anyone I know, but Emacs is it's own world. Best to use straightforward Emacs 23 or 24 as a portal into that world, rather than trying to shoehorn alien concepts into it.
Now, building it on OS X can be a PITA -- not that it's not fully supported, but some stuff could be in better locations than the hated /usr/local. But that's an argument against myself that I'd prefer not to have at this exact moment.