emacs on OS X 10.6

Question

I am a new iMac user. I have extensive experience with Linux on a PC. I downloaded latest version of emacs to the Applications folder. I want to invoke emacs from the command line. However, the default path for emacs is /usr/bin/emacs. what is the best practice for adding the new emacs to the path? I am tempted to create a ~/bin directory and a link to the new emacs and adding ~/bin to the beginning of my path. This is how we did things in our software development environment on linux PC's

Answer 1

Best way is to use Homebrew and use

brew install emacs --cocoa

so you have a easy to update emacs installation. The Cocoa will make sure you have your mac keybinding working before emacs. Make the binary run at startup as a daemon (because it starts up not very fast), for instance:

 /usr/local/Cellar/emacs/23.2/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs --daemon

And make an script to the emacsclient command and saved it to /bin/emacs file (don't forget to make it executable):

#!/bin/bash
exec /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient -n -c "$@"

so when you fire up at bash "emacs something.txt" the already running emacs daemon opens it instantly. You can also extend it to open Emacs if the daemon is not running!

I tested it on the latest emacs 23.2, some features are not present on early versions.