I was excited to see that Emacs for Mac OS X 23.4 was finally released a few weeks ago. It’s my favorite build of emacs for OS X, but it’s got a few annoying little issues I was hoping they’d fix. The biggest is that it’s quite slow when saving files and doing git checkins. Each of these return nearly instantaneously on every other emacs I’ve ever tried, but in this version they take several seconds. That really seems to add up when I’m in the middle of debugging something and doing lots of saves.

But unfortunately, when I installed the new package, I was disappointed to discover that they’d removed all the LaTeX packages that previously came pre-installed. LaTeX support is really important to me these days as I finish up my dissertation, so rather than trying to get them working (only to find other packages I use were also missing) I decided to restore 23.3 from Time Machine.

Sigh.