What are the preferred versions of Vim and Emacs on Mac OS X?
I just download the Emacs source from the GNU site and build it myself. I don't like too many Mac-specific features, because I want Emacs behavior to be consistent on all the platforms I use.
MacVim works well and certainly looks more mature than Vim-Cocoa, moreover there is a Cocoa plugin architecture in the pipeline for MacVim (and someone is already working on a TextMate style file browser tray plugin which is a huge ++ IMHO).
There was also a Carbon version of Vim, but this didn't offer a great deal over the Terminal version. i.e. only allowed one window open, not very OSX in appearance...
Aquamacs is very usable and looks pretty good. Supports both traditional Mac OS style keyboard shortcuts (command-O, command-S) and the Control/Meta shortcuts for those raised on traditional Emacs. It is definitely more Mac-like than Carbon Emacs. It seems stable and fast, but I am not an Emacs guru so I don't stress it all that much when I use it. I can't speak to the extensiveness of the included elisp packages, either.
Someone syncs Carbon Emacs with the upstream tree quarterly I think. Aquamacs has a more irregular schedule, but it's seen some pretty major updates over the last year.
GNU Emacs for OSX can be found at emacsformacosx.com. In addition to the latest stable release, there are also pre-release test builds and nightly builds, and Atom feeds are provided for tracking all three release types.
I like the Nextstep-derived Emacs.app formerly at http://emacs-app.sourceforge.net/ now integrated in Emacs-23 CVS (as of August 2008).
Emacs.app feels more zippy than Aquamacs to me but its just bare CVS-Emacs and doesn't come with the same amount of stuff (you have to install your own AucTeX etc.).
I've tried Aquamacs and it's very usable and looks pretty good. Supports both traditional Mac OS style keyboard shortcuts (command-O, command-S) and the Control/Meta shortcuts for those raised on traditional Emacs. It is definitely more Mac-like than Carbon Emacs. It seems stable and fast, but I am not an Emacs guru so I don't stress it all that much when I use it. I can't speak to the extensiveness of the included ellipse packages, either.
Someone syncs Carbon Emacs with the upstream tree quarterly I think. Aquamacs has a more irregular schedule, but it's seen some pretty major updates over the last year.