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This section briefly describes the peculiarities of using Emacs built with the GNUstep libraries on GNU/Linux or other operating systems, or on Mac OS X with native window system support. For Mac OS X, Emacs can be built either without window system support, with X11, or with the Cocoa interface. This section only applies to the Cocoa build. Emacs 23 does not support Mac OS Classic.
Emacs, when built on Mac OS X, uses the Cocoa application interface. For historical and technical reasons, Emacs uses the term ‘Nextstep’ internally, instead of “Cocoa” or “Mac OS X”; for instance, most of the commands and variables described in the following sections begin with ‘ns-’, which is short for ‘Nextstep’. NeXTstep was an application interface released by NeXT Inc during the 1980s, of which Cocoa is a direct descendant. Apart from Cocoa, there is one other NeXTstep-style system: GNUstep, which is free software. At the moment, Emacs has only incomplete support for GNUstep (see GNUstep Support).
As of the 23.1 release, Emacs is not as stable on Cocoa as on other platforms. We hope to improve this in future releases.