It was probably "meant to be used" (or at least originally written) on a physical terminal rather than a terminal emulator.

Nothing wrong with moving with the times. A graphical emacs session does offer plenty of benefits, not least having less hassle with keybindings, and much greater flexibility with fonts and colours.

That's what I did when I used to us OS X. Then I realized, if I'm just using a terminal anyway, I might as well actually use linux and get a real package manager back.

(Edit: I do miss spotlight. But not as much as I missed apt+dpkg.)

So you use OS X for the nice UI and yet you are willing to use Emacs with an inferior UI?

No thanks. I will stick to Linux.

I use an in-terminal editor all the time on OSX, what I like about OSX is that I get the Sexy UI with a lot of the things I have come to love in Linux(at least in a terminal, where I spend much of my time anyway)

I use OS X because I can keep my dev workflow while getting much nicer applications for everything else.

There's also Aquamacs. Seems to work quite fine.

My memories of Aquamacs are full of fighting with the thing to do what I wanted. It was overriding everything I customized in my .emacs.

About the only positive thing I found about it was the ability to run in full-screen mode (something that ntemacs is still unable to do).

Indeed. But it's not like using Emacs on any other platform.

OK. I do not use it myself. But my fiancee has a Mac and seems quite happy with Aquamacs. (She used Emacs on Ubuntu before for some time, to do LaTeX with.)