Can I make emacsclient start alternate-editor in the background? - macos

I have installed Emacs 24 on my Mac using homebrew, and similar to another question (listed below), I would like to use the same command when first starting Emacs as I do when opening additional files from the command line. To this end, I have set up an alias (modified a bit for readability):
EAPP=/usr/local/Cellar/emacs/24.3/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS
alias emacs='emacsclient -a $EAPP/Emacs -n'
Here's the twist: I put the -n (same as --no-wait) at the end because I like not having to hit C-x # to finish buffers. A side effect that I like is that it returns immediately to the command line.
Could there be a way to alter my alias to make the first-time run go in the background as well? Or should I just teach my fingers to put a & after every invocation of my emacs alias?
Question about making emacs and emacsclient seem the same:
Emacs - connect to daemon (if it exists) without using emacsclient

Related

How to start emacs from the terminal with an emacs command that runs soon after emacs is opened

Is there a way to launch Emacs from terminal and execute some Emacs command automatically soon after Emacs is launched (the command to be executed inside of emacs is provided along with the Emacs-launching command executed from the shell.)
What I want to do exactly is to have a command to launch Emacs and then open a new empty buffer and activate org mode inside of this buffer.
I want something that might look like this
emacs -fs --command="evil-buffer-new && org-mode"
I want the -fs flag because I want Emacs to open in full-screen in this case.
Update
--eval flag didn't work. Forget about evil-buffer-new, I have tried something as simple as:
emacs --eval="(org-mode)" txt.txt
txt.txt is an empty text file created before executing the above command (and please don't ask me why I didn't use .org file extension).
after Emacs opened, org-mode wasn't active. I had to run pp-eval-expression then (org-mode) to activate it, and then it worked.
Am I missing something here? How about rephrasing the question like this:
How to open an empty text file (having .txt file extension) with Emacs from the terminal and have org-mode activated in that buffer automatically?
See C-hig (emacs)Action Arguments or even just run emacs --help -- there are several options for loading and evaluating arbitrary code.
--command="evil-buffer-new && org-mode"
More like:
--eval="(progn (evil-buffer-new) (org-mode))"
But you'll have to figure it out for yourself, because I don't know what evil-buffer-new is specifically.
You told an empty file is created before emacs is started. But instead of an empty file could you create a file with file-local mode variable specifying the org mode ? For example with bash:
#!/bin/bash
cat <<EOF >> "$1"
; -*- mode: Org;-*-
EOF
emacs "$1" &
Now the mode is always resolved correctly with normal major mode selection procedure.

How can I tell my bash prompt to indicate whether there's a backgrounded emacsclient session exists

I'm using, OS X, and mainly terminal and emacsclient.
When I do shell stuff, I background my emacsclient with Control-Z
Someties I forget whether i've done that, and end up spawning additional emacsclient sessions, which I don;t want to do.
It would be cool if the bash prompt can tell me whether emacsclient jobs up in the jobs output
Minimal example for bash, using sleep instead of emacsclient.
PS1="\`if jobs | grep -q sleep; then echo 'sleep jobs' ; else echo 'no sleep jobs' ; fi\`\\\$ "
You might want to filter on stopped jobs (jobs -s).
You can get fancier by echoing escape sequences instead of just strings to colorize it.
While I think #jpkota provides a workable answer, I wonder if maybe your worrying too much. Provided emacsclient is working OK, there is no problem with having multiple emacsclient sessions running at once - in fact, it is sort of designed to do that. The emacsclient connections are light-weight and if there is a chance you might need to use the same file/buffer again, you may as well keep them around and just open new ones when needed and get rid of the ones you don't think you will need. The whole benefit of emacscleint is that opening new windows/buffers is really fast and if you use the GUI verison, they just pop up in their own window.
There is also a package in elpa which may be useful called osx-pseudo-daemon, which addresses a problem that can occur if you close all emacsclient windows which prevents the main emacs from responding (this is when yu run emacs from launchctl.
What I tend to do is run emacsclient in GUI mode rather than inside a terminal. When I run emacsclient I put it in the background so that it doesn't block my terminal and use the -c flag.(I actually have a shell script which makes this easy - see http://emacsformacosx.com/tips for some ideas. I leave the emacsclient window open and just switch to it if I need to do some emacs editing etc.

Cannot open multiple files with Emacs on Mac

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).

Implicitly launch detached program (&) from terminal

I feel sure this will end up as a duplicate, but I don't know how to word it so that I can search for it...
I like to do my programming in emacs, which I launch from the terminal. When I use my mac I use aquamacs and the command
aquamacs Program.py
will launch aquamacs in a separate window ready to edit Program.py. When I work on my linux machine however to get the same result I must type
emacs Program.py &
And I'm always forgetting the "&". So 70% of the time I end up closing the emacs window, and relaunching again with the "&". Now I understand why that "&" is there, but is there a way to set up my system so that the command
emacs Program.py
always launches as a detached process? The only time I might not want that behavior is if I was SSHing in over a slow connection, in which case I usually use "-nw" anyway.
You can click on the terminal and press Ctrl-Z to move an already running foreground process to the background.
Alternatively you could add this function to your ~/.bashrc:
emacs() {
command emacs "$#" &
}
For the specific case of emacs, I use a shell script, which is more complicated than this but for your purposes boils down to
#!/bin/csh -f
/bin/emacs $*:q &
Put it in a directory which is earlier in your $path than where the "real" emacs is, and replace /bin/emacs with the real path to emacs on your system.

open a file in an emacs buffer while in emacs terminal

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.

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