Macos – How to open emacs from Mac’s Finder

1. You've got this handled

2. Yes, you'll want to use emacsclient. To get a new frame, add the -c option. I have an alias to make it quicker and to tell emacsclient not to wait for emacs server to return:

   alias em='emacsclient -n'
   

3. emacsclient -nw
4. I'm not sure about this. I start Emacs once and always load new files either within emacs or using my em alias.

Update:

Check out this tip documenting how to use Platypus to create an app wrapper around emacsclient. You could then use "Open With..." to launch using your new app wrapper.

This got rid of the error for me:

$ sudo mv /usr/bin/emacs /usr/bin/emacs.old

Now edit /usr/bin/emacs in a text editor and paste this in:

#!/bin/sh

EMACS_PATH=/Applications/MacPorts/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs

if [ $(id -u) = "0" ]; then
    sudo $EMACS_PATH "$@"
else
    $EMACS_PATH "$@"
fi

(Replace $EMACS_PATH with the actual path to your Emacs binary.) Finally, make your shell script executable:

$ sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/emacs

For whatever reason, Cocoa Emacs doesn't like to be linked to /usr/bin/emacs, but it runs without complaints if you invoke it from its actual path. Probably a working directory issue.

If someone knows a better way to do this, I'm all ears.

edit: updated script to handle quotes in arguments properly