MacOS – Auctex View works or does not depending on how I launched Emacs

auctexemacslatexmacospdf

I try to open a PDF in Skim from Emacs (via Auctex's View command) on MacOSX Mavericks 10.9.2.

When I open Emacs.app by double-clicking or through Spotlight, it fails. Nothing happens. There's no message and no error. But, when I open Emacs from Terminal (~$ open /Applications/Emacs.app or ~$ /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs), it works. What's going on here?

In both cases the same Emacs.app is running, the exec-path is the same, and the same command is used: /Applications/Skim.app/Contents/SharedSupport/displayline 25 "test.pdf" "test.tex". These files and test.synctex.gz are in my home directory. So, what's different between launching from Terminal and launching by double-clicking?

This used to work before I upgraded to Mavericks, so I wonder whether this is a Mavericks issue. Has someone been able to open Skim from Emacs on MacOSX Mavericks? Has someone seen something similar?

I tried the latest stable Emacs (24.3) from both Homebrew and emacsformacosx.com each time with the same result.

Below is some Homebrew information:

~$ brew doctor
Your system is ready to brew.
~$ brew info emacs
emacs: stable 24.3, HEAD
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
/usr/local/Cellar/emacs/24.3 (3909 files, 115M) *
  Built from source with: --cocoa, --srgb
From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/commits/master/Library/Formula/emacs.rb
==> Dependencies
Build: pkg-config ✔
Optional: gnutls ✘
==> Options
--cocoa
    Build a Cocoa version of emacs
--japanese
    Patch for Japanese input methods
--keep-ctags
    Don't remove the ctags executable that emacs provides
--srgb
    Enable sRGB colors in the Cocoa version of emacs
--use-git-head
    Use Savannah (faster) git mirror for HEAD builds
--with-gnutls
    Build with gnutls support
--with-x
    Include X11 support
--HEAD
    install HEAD version
==> Caveats
.app bundles were installed.
Run `brew linkapps` to symlink these to /Applications.
~$ 

Best Answer

I disabled all settings till it worked again and tracked down the problem to where I wrongfully set the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH when emacs is not launched from the command line. Apparently, this influences launching Skim...

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