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How to launch GUI Emacs from command line in OSX?

How do I launch GUI Emacs from the command line in OSX?

I have downloaded and installed Emacs from http://emacsformacosx.com/.

I'll accept an answer fulfilling all of the following criteria:

The emacs window opens in front of my terminal window. Typing "emacs" launches a GUI Emacs window. Finding files in that window will default to looking in the directory from where I started Emacs. Typing "emacs foo.txt" when foo.txt exists launches a GUI Emacs window with foo.txt loaded. Typing "emacs foo.txt" when foo.txt does not exist launches a GUI Emacs window with an empty text buffer named "foo.txt". Doing ^X^S in that buffer will save foo.txt in the directory from where I started Emacs.

Which of those criteria are not met by entering 'emacs' at a terminal prompt? Your requirements describe the default behaviour on Linux. I haven't used a Mac in a while, but I think the trick was just finding the right program to execute - emacs.app maybe?
Tyler, coming from a Linux background I'm with you all the way; just typing "emacs" at the prompt should be all I need to do. Doing that on OSX launches the text mode Emacs in the terminal window however (thus failing criteria 1), and that's not what I want.
Johan - have you found a solution in the meantime? I am struggling with the same problems and think about starting a bounty. Especially annoying is that calling emacs (and not the Emacs.app) from the command line opens a window in the background...
@DougHarris My requirements match reality on any Linux distro, that's where they come from. I'm happy you have a found a workflow that works for you. Cheers!
I don't know whether it works on OSX but you could try: emacsclient -c -a "" "$@" command

D
David Caldwell

Call the following script "emacs" and put it in your PATH somewhere:

#!/bin/sh
/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs "$@"

That covers #2, #3, and #4.

For #1, put this somewhere in your .emacs file:

(x-focus-frame nil)

The emacsformacosx.com site now has a How-To page, which is where the top snippet came from. There's more info there about running emacsclient and hooking Emacs up to git mergetool.


Works great. Bounty forthcoming.
Thanks - Works for me also!
On Mavericks if I am in folder ~/foo and want to open bar.txt I type gmacs bar.txt but it creates a new file at ~/bar.txt instead of opening ~foo/bar.txt. Am I doing something wrong?
Where is the .emacs file?
You can't add (x-focus-frame nil) just anywhere, it has to be within the (custom-set-variables) expression, which emacs will create for you once you set anything through customization. Just customize something from the menu bar, like setting "blinking cursor" on (then off if you dislike it) and that section will be created in your .emacs. Also, is this even tested? I'm not sure emacs on Cocoa will even respect this setting.
D
David J.

In your shell, alias the command 'emacs' to point to the OSX emacs application

In my shell (running the default bash), I have the following (in my .bashrc)

alias emacs='open -a /Applications/Emacs.app $1'

Then, typing emacs on the command line starts the emacs application.

I would, however, recommend that you open a copy of emacs and just keep it up and running. If that's the case, and you want to load a file into an existing copy of emacs, you can use the emacsclient by placing the following in your .bashrc:

alias ec='/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient'

Then add the following to your .emacs file to start the emacs server (which receives the emacsclient calls)

;;========================================
;; start the emacsserver that listens to emacsclient
(server-start)

Then you can type

ec .bashrc

to load a copy of .bashrc into an existing emacs session!


Hi Chris! Your first answer fails criteria 2 and 4. Your second answer fails criterion 2. I'm looking for a solution that fulfills all of the numbered criteria. Regards /Johan
It seems that all of your issues could be solved if you merely used emacs itself to load the files, rather than relying on a command-line to launch a new instance each time. I typically start emacs at the start of my day (if it's not still running), and use it to load files, change directories, create new files and whatever else I want without ever touching the terminal window.
I have to say, there are several of these questions on this site that deal with this question, but this is the only one that fully solves the problem of also opening a file, in a short eloquent manner.
@tylerthemiler, where's the answer that fully solves the problem? Both of the answers in this answer fail criterion 2 and the first one fails 4 as well.
A little tact goes a long way in getting a question answered. So does a little Googling.
C
Community

This improves on David Caldwell's answer by starting Emacs in the background:

#!/bin/sh
$(/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs "$@") &

As stated in the other answer, this covers #2, #3, and #4. For #1, put this somewhere in your .emacs file: (x-focus-frame nil).

Note that the following does not work for me -- it does not start Emacs in a directory specified on the command line (e.g. emacs .)

# NOT RECOMMENDED
#!/bin/sh
/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs "$@" &

This fixes a problem with OSX (perhaps starting with 10.9 Mavericks). As of 10.9, the "not recommended" method fails, where as up to at least 10.6, the not recommended did sync the shell $PWD and Emacs (pwd). David's answer might be elsewhere, but how do you get search engines to understand: "pwd not pwd"?
Both snippets in this answer don't start emacs in the correct directory when I tested on macOS 10.15.6 and Emacs 26.2.
F
FooF

I assume you either:

Start the emacs daemon on login

Have (server-start) in your .emacs

Don't mind having lots of separate copies of emacs running

If so, then I think this satisfies the original four criteria, plus one more:

The emacs window opens in front of my terminal window.

it will always open to the foreground (with x-focus-frame).

Typing "emacs" launches a GUI Emacs window. Finding files in that window will default to looking in the directory from where I started Emacs.

It will open an existing emacs window in dired mode.

Typing "emacs foo.txt" when foo.txt exists launches a GUI Emacs window with foo.txt loaded.

If emacs is already running and has a server, then it will open in the existing window and come to the foreground.

Typing "emacs foo.txt" when foo.txt does not exist launches a GUI Emacs window with an empty text buffer named "foo.txt". Doing ^X^S in that buffer will save foo.txt in the directory from where I started Emacs.

Correct.

One extra:

Control returns to the terminal session immediately after typing the command.

~/bin/emacs

#!/bin/bash
EMACSPATH=/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS

# Check if an emacs server is available 
# (by checking to see if it will evaluate a lisp statement)

if ! (${EMACSPATH}/bin/emacsclient --eval "t"  2> /dev/null > /dev/null )
then
    # There is no server available so,
    # Start Emacs.app detached from the terminal 
    # and change Emac's directory to PWD

    nohup ${EMACSPATH}/Emacs --chdir "${PWD}" "${@}" 2>&1 > /dev/null &
else
    # The emacs server is available so use emacsclient

    if [ -z "${@}" ]
    then
        # There are no arguments, so
        # tell emacs to open a new window

        ${EMACSPATH}/bin/emacsclient --eval "(list-directory \"${PWD}\")"
    else    
        # There are arguments, so
        # tell emacs to open them

        ${EMACSPATH}/bin/emacsclient --no-wait "${@}"
    fi

    # Bring emacs to the foreground

    ${EMACSPATH}/bin/emacsclient --eval "(x-focus-frame nil)"
fi

Awesome! It seems your args and no-args legs are switched though.
m
mforbes

On Mountain Lion, I am using Yamamoto Mitsuharu's port https://github.com/railwaycat/emacs-mac-port with the following alias:

alias emacs=/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs

and it satisfies all of your criteria.


Y
Yuriy Skvortsov

Just built emacs with homebrew package manager according to this guide: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsForMacOS with brew install --cocoa emacs After that one should launch the .app version to get gui, which in my case was /usr/local/Cellar/emacs/24.3/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs


--cocoa was deprecated; using --with-cocoa instead!
s
sbecker11

Further improving on David James' response the following works for me:

Per instructions to open a file from a terminal found at http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsForMacOS#toc20

open -a /Applications/Emacs.app <file-name>

combining this with David Jame's response I've created the following emax bash script and placed it in my path at ~/bin

#!/bin/bash
(open -a /Applications/Emacs.app "$@") &

Caveat: in order to get emacs to open the current directory in Dired by name mode, you need to use

emax .

Environment:

OS X Yosemite Version 10.10.2

GNU Emacs 24.4.2 (x86_64-apple-darwin14.0.0, NS apple-appkit-1343.14) of 2014-11-13


This only works for an existing file, it wont create one if its not there
I'm using macOS 10.15 (Catalina), and it seems that this works the first time (when Emacs is not already open), but does not work the second time (when an Emacs window is already open). Do you know how to fix this?
o
ocodo

Simple solution...

A lot of very complex solutions to this problem are posted here. That's fair because it seems non-trivial.

However, this solution works really well for me.

ec() {
  emacsclient -n $@ 2> /dev/null
  if [[ $? == 1 ]]; then
    open -a Emacs.app  -- $@
  fi
}

Usage

ec file [...]

Let's unpack what's happening:

pass all the ec arguments to emacsclient and don't (-n) wait for emacs before continuing. If Emacs is already running, we're all done and you're editing. swallow up the error message posted by emacsclient when there's no emacs running. (2> /dev/null) Manually handle the exit code 1 ([[ $? == 1 ]]) open Emacs.app and pass file arguments to it (paths will be correctly opened.) You're all done, and Emacs has opened your files.


j
jackkamm

The other answers here didn't quite work for me. In particular, on my machine, the bash script

#!/bin/sh
/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs "$@" 

always opens emacs in the home directory. To get it to open in the current working directory, I had to do

#!/bin/sh
/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs "$PWD/$@"

instead.


My particular build/install doesn't have that issue, but there is an issue with your solution. If you try to open more than one file, only the first will expand to the PWD directory. The rest will not have a $PWD path prefixed.
r
rake

Compile Emacs according to the following steps:

./configure --with-x --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

And your done! It may help to download and install XQuartz, but that's just my opinion.


K
Koren.H

This is my script for open emacs/emacsclient on osx.

#!/bin/bash

# Ensure (server-start) is added in your emacs init script.

EMACS=/Applications/MacPorts/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs
EMACSCLIENT=/Applications/Macports/Emacs.app/\
Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient

# test if client already exsit.
$EMACSCLIENT -e "(frames-on-display-list)" &>/dev/null

# use emacsclient to connect existing server.
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
    $EMACSCLIENT -n "$@"
# open emacs.app instead.
else
    `$EMACS "$@"` &
fi

u
user3696153

In all of the above when using "open" - make sure you use the "--args" option

Do not do this:

alias emacs='open -a /Applications/Emacs.app $1'

Instead this:

alias emacs='open -a /Applications/Emacs.app --args $1'

the --args option prevents "open" from consuming various options intended for Emacs.


For some reason, when I tested this on macOS 10.15.6 and Emacs 26.2 the emacs working directory was set to my home directory, meaning I couldn't open files using relative paths. This did fix the issue of open non-existent files though.
g
gsingh2011

The top answer is good, but I wanted the emacs process to run in the background so I could still use my shell. This answer appeared to do what I wanted, but didn't start emacs in the right directory, meaning absolute paths were required (or hacks to append pwd to the paths which wouldn't work in all cases). Furthermore, simply using & meant that if I killed the terminal, emacs would also be killed.

I decided to use screen and a bash function, and the following solution works for me on macOS 10.15.6 and emacs 26.2 installed with brew:

function emacs() {
    screen -d -m /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs "$@"
}

For the meaning of the -d -m command line flags, they have a special meaning when used together and so can essentially be thought of as one command line flag. The explanation is in the manpage:

Start screen in "detached" mode. This creates a new session but doesn't attach to it. This is useful for system startup scripts.


The question explicitly requested Emacs in a GUI window, and this opens Emacs in a terminal session.
@JohanWalles, this opens Emacs in a GUI window.
screen threw me off, now that I read more carefully I realize you're right. My apologies @gsingh2011.
Could you edit or comment to explain the effect of screen -d -m for this case?
@JoshuaGoldberg, I think I answered that in the answer. I wanted to run emacs in the background and retain use of my terminal. There are other answers that provided similar functionality, but they came with some downsides, like starting in the wrong directory or tying the emacs process lifetime to the terminal process lifetime. My answer (using screen) avoids those shortcomings.
a
alper
open_emacs() {
    num=$(ps aux | grep -E "[E]macs-x86_64-10_14 --|[e]macs --" | wc -l)
    if [ $num -eq 0 ]; then
        echo "## starting emacs"
        # Run in a subshell to remove notifications and close STDOUT and STDERR:
        (&>/dev/null emacsclient -t -q &)
    fi
}

alias e="open_emacs"

Following line (&>/dev/null emacsclient -t -q &) will start the emacs daemon if it is not running on the background.

macOS may have defined the app name starting with E (ex: Emacs-x86_64-10_14.app), based on that you can check whether the emacs daemon running on the background or not.