I can open a single file with Emacs, no problem. But I'm used to Emacs on Linux, where typing emacs test.cpp & would open a new Emacs frame, leaving the terminal free. On OS X, however, when I try to open a new frame with emacs test.cpp &, the terminal shows a process was created but the window fails to pop up. If I push Ctrl+C, the terminal shows "Stopped", but I see the process is still running because I can see it in the task monitor.
How to solve this problem? Thanks!
The issue here is that the command emacs on Linux is generally just the Emacs binary itself, which opens a new frame (that's Emacs-speak for X11 or other GUI window) unless you specify -nw on the command line; in contrast, the emacs command provided by Homebrew is a shell script that calls /usr/local/Cellar/emacs/24.3/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs -nw "$#" (substituting the version installed for 24.3). So the Homebrew version launches as a terminal app.
You can make a shell script that just runs /usr/local/Cellar/emacs/24.3/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs "$#", and it would behave somewhat as you expect, except that you would be launching a brand-new instance of the Mac app, which would cause an additional Emacs icon to appear on the Dock. Such a thing isn't considered "Mac-like," but it's not the end of the world.
An alternate solution, which is used a lot across different operating systems, is to make one Emacs process a server and then use emacsclient to open files from the command line. Emacsclient can open files in the current terminal, a new frame (GUI window), or an existing instance of Emacs. For an instance of Emacs to run as a server just requires that you run M-x server-start within it, or put (server-start) inside your init file (~/.emacs or ~/.emacs.d/init.el).
My Emacs config has this snippet, which starts server mode automatically when I launch the GUI app:
(when (display-graphic-p)
(server-start))
Then, once Emacs is running (you can make it autostart upon login in System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items), type emacsclient -nw test.cpp to open the file in the terminal, or emacsclient test.cpp & to open it in an existing frame, or emacsclient -c test.cpp & to open a new frame. (Note that if you open it in an existing frame, you use C-x # to close the buffer without closing the frame, as opposed to C-x C-c.)
Note that the terminal emacsclient command I gave just now didn't use & but the GUI ones did. & at the end of a command line puts the process in the background, meaning it's not monopolizing your terminal. For whatever reason (probably because it wouldn't be sensible to have a full-screen terminal app running in the background), when you invoke the terminal version of Emacs with &, it just suspends itself. The same thing would happen if you pressed C-z within Emacs. To get it back into the foreground, type fg (actually you can have multiple background processes, in which case fg would just pick the most recent one unless you specified a job specifier; see bash's man page (man bash) and search for JOB CONTROL if you're interested in the details).
Related
Does anyone know why my terminal opens a new instance of emacs whenever I run emacs "filename" from my terminal?
My google results about the issue showed too many occurrences of people trying to do this liberately, but my emacs is doing this by default for some reason.
I've found no resolving cases in my init.el or ~/.zshrc
If emacs is already running, you can start a server (M-x start-server) from within emacs, and open files with emacsclient on the command line. You may create an alias for that.
Spacemacs has a dotspacemacs-enable-server setting in your init.el file (SPC f e d) to always enable the server.
This is a pretty normal default behavior for any program. If you have a cat process running in one terminal, and you run cat again in another, they're not going to somehow share: you get two copies of cat running. The same thing applies to emacs. There are configuration options to change this, basically by making the first instance of emacs act as a server. Then the second emacs still starts a new process, but instead of continuing to set up a brand new editor it just sends information to the server process.
Let's say I'm running xterm or some other terminal emulator on top of some graphical X Window Environment. xterm on KDE, for example. I want to write an application that may be called on the command line of one terminal emulator, and upon execution, the application creates a new KDE/Environment window, separate from the current terminal emulator, and on that new window run an Ncurses context for application purposes.
How would I do this? Is this terminal emulator dependent? Desktop environment dependent? Would I be using bare X window system calls?
It's terminal (emulator) dependent.
Curses runs in terminals and terminal emulators. Most of the latter (terminal emulators) have some way to tell what program (other than your shell) to run in the terminal emulator.
For instance, xterm can be told using the -e option,
-e program [ arguments ... ]
This option specifies the program (and its command line
arguments) to be run in the xterm window. It also sets the
window title and icon name to be the basename of the program
being executed if neither -T nor -n are given on the command
line.
NOTE: This must be the last option on the command line.
letting you start an xterm running MyApplication like this:
xterm -e MyApplication
Again, most of the terminal emulators you might run in X accept that option. KDE konsole does that. There's no manual, but
konsole --help-all
shows it at the end.
Is it possible to reuse backgrounded emacsclient windows, when invoking emacsclient?
Here's some background information (I mainly use emacs in terminal mode, not gui frames)
When the computer boots, an emacs daemon is started.
In the OS X terminal when I want to open a file, I do emacsclient /filename -nw
Now when I want to do bash stuff I press C-z to background emacs.
Now emacs appears in the jobs command. The fg command would also
make it re-appear.
But while I'm browsing around in bash, I see another file I want to open.
Now, how can I reuse that minimized emacsclient session with a single command?
Yes, put this in your .bashrc:
ec() {
kill %emacsclient 2> /dev/null
emacsclient -nw --eval '(find-file "'"$PWD/$1"'")'
}
Open files with ec file.txt. It's a bit hacky, but I think it will do what you want it to.
I open the file find-file so it'll stay open after you close the Emacs window (C-x C-c). Then when you open a new file, I kill the old Emacs window and open a new one. The effect is that the old file stays open forever, so it seems like you reused the Emacs window.
I copy text from outside of Vim. ⌘V in other apps pastes text without problem. In MacVim, it doesn't work.
In Insert Mode, nothing appears. In Normal Mode, I get E353: Nothing in register +. This happens when set clipboard=unnamed is on or off.
Oddly enough, this was working before. What's wrong?
If you are using tmux and sometimes you initially launch MacVim via the mvim command-line program, then you might be encountering the problem that prompted me to write the reattach-to-user-namespace command.
My guess is that clipboard access worked on prior occasions because you happened to have launched MacVim via a “normal” GUI method (e.g. the dock, Finder, Spotlight, etc.). The clipboard later became inaccessible after you had quit the prior instance of MacVim and relaunched it through (e.g.) mvim from inside a tmux session.
The core problem is that programs launched in certain contexts (i.e. inside a tmux session) end up with an environment that denies them access to certain services (e.g. the OS X pasteboard).
The initial launch is the important one here. New windows started by mvim-in-tmux (even without the above-linked wrapper program) should have access to the clipboard as long as MacVim was previously started “via the GUI” (maybe there are still some MacVim windows open, or maybe you have MacVim configured to keep running even when there are no windows open). Correspondingly, to regain access to the clipboard you will need to close all your existing MacVim windows, quit the application, then restart it in a way that has access to the clipboard (e.g. via the GUI, or “inside” the wrapper).
Once you have the above-linked wrapper program installed (it is also available through MacPorts and Homebrew), you can use a command like reattach-to-user-namespace mvim to ensure that if it ends up starting a new MacVim instance, then that new instance will have access to the clipboard. You might use an alias, shell function, or a script to make sure you always “wrap” mvim.
Several other commands also benefit from “wrapping” (pbpaste, pbcopy, nohup, launchctl (depending on which subcommand you are using)), so you may want to “wrap” your whole shell instead of the individual commands. The bit of the process environment that the “wrapper” modifies is inherited by child processes, so “wrapping” your shell will affect most commands you run from it. If you are using tmux, you could configure your default-command to automatically “wrap” your default tmux shells:
set-option -g default-command "reattach-to-user-namespace -l zsh"
Suppose I am in terminal in Emacs (M-x term), and I list the following files in current directory:
text_code.R
Now I am in bash-3.2$ (terminal) and hope to open this .R file in another Emacs buffer and then edit. Is there a way to do it? This might be a trivial question, for I am a newbie to Linux and Emacs. Thanks in advance!
Remember that in Term Mode you can type C-c C-f to open a file (just like C-x C-f outside Term Mode). The prompt will already be on your current directory, so you just have to start typing the name of the file and autocomplete it with TAB.
I don't know the official procedure for what you want to do, but here is a procedure that works:
Either tell emacs to run as a daemon (Ref: EmacsAsDaemon) or in emacs start daemon via M-x server-start.
In the term, a command like emacsclient -n filename will start editing the specified file in the current window. Note, emacsclient also has a -c, --create-frame option to edit in a new frame. You probably will want to use a -n option as above, so you can continue using your term, after selecting it from the buffers list in another pane or frame.
If you start the daemon via M-x server-start in emacs, the daemon will terminate when you exit from emacs. If you set it up via reference mentioned above, use kill-emacs or save-buffers-kill-emacs commands or shell command emacsclient -e '(kill-emacs)' to stop it, as mentioned in part 6 of reference.