as someone already commented get aquamacs! I started out programming using emacs because all the cool kids on slashdot did as time moved on I starting using vi/vim as "its everywhere" but I have started used aquamacs at home and I love it! It's like meeting up with an old friend after a few years apart and everything just clicking again (it probably helps I've learned lisp in the interim)
re: crashing on change of color themes. he's probably using the new-ish cocoa-fied emacs in the 24 branch. It's still a bit buggy. Use the carbon build from 23 or just look for a diff if you really want to use 24.
I'm more interested in why people insist on GUI Emacs.
Way back when I decided to first try out Linux (and then ended up using it for most of this millennium before taking a job which provided me with a Mac laptop), it took me a bit to get accustomed to doing most things from a terminal window (and I was fortunate in that the all-singing, all-dancing GUI automation stuff of modern Linux distros didn't exist yet), but once I was comfortable with it I couldn't imagine going back to anything else.
But then I also laughed when I saw the fad for "full-screen" text editing on the Mac a while back; when I want to hack or write I don't have to tune out, say, IRC or email because Emacs is running in one window of my screen session and IRC and email are running in others where I don't see them unless I'm actually using them :)
I like GUI Emacs because keys like C-/ work, even if they have no ASCII code, and I don't have to wonder if I'm going to get random backslashes if I try to copy and paste into another window. There really isn't that much difference between switching between Emacs and, say, IRC, by using Alt-Tab or ^A ^A.
Actually, Cocoa Emacs is in the 23 (development) branch and Carbon is in 22. Cocoa Emacs definitely has some rough edges. Personally, I use Carbon/GNU Emacs from:
