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

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

Answer 2

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))