How to start “emacsformacosx” in terminal

Question

I am using MAC OX 10.6 , and install the emacs from here http://emacsformacosx.com/

I want to know how to start it in terminal, so my ecb can open current directory<

Answer 1

By default terminal will open /usr/bin/emacs on OS X. You can change this behavior by changing what the "emacs" command will do. Open up ~/.profile and type the following:

alias emacs=open /Applications/Emacs.app

The next time you open a prompt this change will be active. (or you can run "source ~/.profile")

Answer 2

In my ~/.profile i have the following:

function emacs
{
    if [ -e "$@" ]
    then
        command open -a emacs "${@}"
    else
        touch "$@"
        command open -a emacs "${@}"
    fi
}

(The reason for having a function is to make it also work when the specified file does not yet exist when emacs is started)

Answer 3

The answer from @Toymakerii is a good one, but you might also consider adding:

export PATH=/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin:$PATH

This way, you can use emacsclient to open files in an already-running Emacs instance:

emacsclient -t SOMEFILE   # Open SOMEFILE in a terminal frame
emacsclient -c SOMEFILE   # Open SOMEFILE in a new graphical frame

Depending on your Emacs version, you might need to put the following in your ~/.emacs.d/init.el (or ~/.emacs, if you're old-fashioned):

(require 'server)
(unless (server-running-p)
  (server-start))

Answer 4

The easiest is to simply do

open /Applications/Emacs.app --args foo

An alias would then be

alias emacs=open /Applications/Emacs.app --args "${@}"

or in csh/tcsh

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

edit: this seems to need a full path to open the correct file... I don't know if this is a problem with Emacs.app or with tcsh

Answer 5

It is actually quite easy, just run it from terminal like this:

/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs -nw

the -nw option means to start emacs without the gui frame.

You can put the following in your shell (on my mac .zshenv) :

alias Emacs="/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs -nw"

Then I just have two commands:

Emacs : for emacs version 24

emacs : for the apple version of emacs

Of course you can just alias the Emacs.app to emacs, but this allows me to customize the two differently - for instance Emacs 24 allows me to use list-packages and so forth. emacs 22 ignores most of this, so I can always revert to a 'bare metal' emacs if need be. Your usage may vary, but if you don't remember the arguments to emacs you can find them by doing this:

emacs --help

Some interesting ones:

Emacs.app --fullscreen
Emacs.app --line-spacing
Emacs.app --vertical-scroll-bars

More info here : http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Option-Index.html#Option-Index