I am trying to use emacs -batch to create a csv file that shows all the todo items in my org-mode file. It works great on my linux box, but I can't get it to work in OSX.
Here is the command I am using:
emacs -batch -l ~/.emacs org-mode -eval '(org-batch-agenda-csv "t")'
OSX doesn't recognize org-batch-agenda-csv, but it will recognize a non-csv version:
emacs -batch -l ~/.emacs org-mode -eval '(org-batch-agenda "t")'
However, this still doesn't work. It comes back with the following response:
Agenda file ~/projects.org is not in `org-mode'
I think I have narrowed down the root problem. Emacs and emacs as opened by the terminal work differently. Emacs will autorecognize my org files, but if I open them in the terminal, emacs will start in fundamental mode. I think if I could get emacs terminal mode to auto-recognize org-files the problem would go away. Oddly, it doesn't seem to have trouble auto-recognizing other file types. It is almost like it isn't actually reading my .emacs file.
I can't seem to find anything through google. Hopefully I'm not the only person who has this issue.
Appreciate any pointers you can help me with.
-- Russ
Thanks Lindydancer. So for some reason OSX terminal opens up emacs version 22 instead of version 24. The same command works great if it is called as the binary file from Applications file.
/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs -batch -l ~/.emacs org-mode -eval '(org-batch-agenda "t")'
Thanks for the help!
When I have a trouble with Emacs settings (that is quite often), I move setting directory and restart emacs.
But I think there is a better way to do it.
I'm using emacs 24 in osx. How can I launch Emacs without loading user settings?
The -q option (alias for lets you invoke Emacs from the command line without running the startup script.
The other relevant options are:
--no-init-file, -q load neither ~/.emacs nor default.el
--no-site-file do not load site-start.el
--quick, -Q equivalent to -q --no-site-file --no-splash
On OS X, you can invoke Emacs like this:
/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs -Q ~/myfile.txt &
I want to create a command line executable which will spawn an emacs window/application.
I searched on the internet and found that the emacs shipped with Mac is not supported in X11 window So, I downloaded the latest emacs from http://emacsformacosx.com/ and installed it in my mac.Then I go to the /usr/bin directory and create a symbolic link like this:
sudo ln /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs xemacs
when I run this symblolic link by ./xemacs it says(. means /usr/bin):
Warning: arch-dependent data dir
(/Users/david/src/emacs-dev/ftp-versions/emacs-24.2/nextstep/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS//libexec/emacs/24.2/x86_64-apple-darwin/)
does not exist. Warning: arch-independent data dir
(/Users/david/src/emacs-dev/ftp-versions/emacs-24.2/nextstep/Emacs.app/Contents/Resources/share/emacs/24.2/etc/)
does not exist. Error: charsets directory not found:
/Users/david/src/emacs-dev/ftp-versions/emacs-24.2/nextstep/Emacs.app/Contents/Resources/share/emacs/24.2/etc/charsets
Emacs will not function correctly without the character map files.
Please check your installation!
But if I run the Emacs binary in directory /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/ it starts the application without any error.
Any one knows how to solve this problem?
Up to this point I think the best way is to create an executable script under /usr/bin which will execute the binary file /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs. The reason I didn't use "open" command is that I need to use some Emacs binary arguments. Compared to "open" this method can spawn multiple instance of emacs.
The script is :
#! /bin/sh
/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs "$#"
Then make it executable by doing chmod +x script.sh
then make the symlink
ln -s "/usr/local/bin/script.sh" /usr/local/bin/xemacs
You could use an alias: alias emacs="open -a Emacs --args <youroptions>.
The option --args allows you to pass options directly to emacs (e.g., -q avoids the evaluation of the init script).
How do I launch GUI Emacs from the command line in OSX?
I have downloaded and installed Emacs from http://emacsformacosx.com/.
I'll accept an answer fulfilling all of the following criteria:
The emacs window opens in front of my terminal window.
Typing "emacs" launches a GUI Emacs window. Finding files in that window will default to looking in the directory from where I started Emacs.
Typing "emacs foo.txt" when foo.txt exists launches a GUI Emacs window with foo.txt loaded.
Typing "emacs foo.txt" when foo.txt does not exist launches a GUI Emacs window with an empty text buffer named "foo.txt". Doing ^X^S in that buffer will save foo.txt in the directory from where I started Emacs.
Call the following script "emacs" and put it in your PATH somewhere:
#!/bin/sh
/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs "$#"
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.
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!
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 "$#" &
I assume you either:
Start the emacs daemon on login
Have (server-start) in your .emacs
Don't mind having lots of separate copies of emacs running
If so, then I think this satisfies the original four criteria, plus one more:
The emacs window opens in front of my terminal window.
it will always open to the foreground (with x-focus-frame).
Typing "emacs" launches a GUI Emacs window. Finding files in that window will default to looking in the directory from where I started Emacs.
It will open an existing emacs window in dired mode.
Typing "emacs foo.txt" when foo.txt exists launches a GUI Emacs window with foo.txt loaded.
If emacs is already running and has a server, then it will open in the existing window and come to the foreground.
Typing "emacs foo.txt" when foo.txt does not exist launches a GUI Emacs window with an empty text buffer named "foo.txt". Doing ^X^S in that buffer will save foo.txt in the directory from where I started Emacs.
Correct.
One extra:
Control returns to the terminal session immediately after typing the command.
~/bin/emacs
#!/bin/bash
EMACSPATH=/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS
# Check if an emacs server is available
# (by checking to see if it will evaluate a lisp statement)
if ! (${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
${EMACSPATH}/bin/emacsclient --eval "(x-focus-frame nil)"
fi
On Mountain Lion, I am using Yamamoto Mitsuharu's port https://github.com/railwaycat/emacs-mac-port with the following alias:
alias emacs=/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs
and it satisfies all of your criteria.
Just built emacs with homebrew package manager according to this guide:
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsForMacOS
with brew install --cocoa emacs
After that one should launch the .app version to get gui, which in my case was /usr/local/Cellar/emacs/24.3/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs
Further improving on David James' response the following works for me:
Per instructions to open a file from a terminal found at http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsForMacOS#toc20
open -a /Applications/Emacs.app <file-name>
combining this with David Jame's response I've created the following emax bash script and placed it in my path at ~/bin
#!/bin/bash
(open -a /Applications/Emacs.app "$#") &
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
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 ([[ $? == 1 ]])
open Emacs.app and pass file arguments to it (paths will be correctly opened.)
You're all done, and Emacs has opened your files.
The other answers here didn't quite work for me. In particular, on my machine, the bash script
#!/bin/sh
/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs "$#"
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.
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.
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
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 $1'
the --args option prevents "open" from consuming various options intended for Emacs.
The top answer is good, but I wanted the emacs process to run in the background so I could still use my shell. This answer appeared to do what I wanted, but didn't start emacs in the right directory, meaning absolute paths were required (or hacks to append pwd to the paths which wouldn't work in all cases). Furthermore, simply using & meant that if I killed the terminal, emacs would also be killed.
I decided to use screen and a bash function, and the following solution works for me on macOS 10.15.6 and emacs 26.2 installed with brew:
function emacs() {
screen -d -m /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs "$#"
}
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.
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.
Just want to update a response to this question. Since it is still a relevant question, but now there is an easier solution:
brew install --cask emacs
When this installs Emacs, it does the behavior you requested, without further intervention. It even runs the Emacs Server on startup.
Files installed/linked by default:
ebrowse -> /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/ebrowse
emacs -> /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs
emacsclient -> /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient
etags -> /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/etags
BTW, this is now a recommended way of installing Emacs on MacOS:
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/download.html#nonfree
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
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
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))
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)
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")
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