Macos – How to run Mac OSX graphical Emacs in daemon mode

Running a process or application as a launchd daemon gives it a very different environment from running it normally or on the command line. I wonder if it might not work better to instead use a shell script as a login item.

For example:

#!/bin/bash
while true
do
  open -W /Applications/Emacs.app
done

This script would need to be saved to a file with a .command extension and 755 permissions (chmod 0755 myemacsscript.command) and then added to the System Preferences : Login : Login Items pane.

When you login, Terminal will launch and run this script. You will probably want to setup a default terminal profile that excludes terminal from prompting on quit for this particular script, so that it doesn't hold you up when you log out.

I have no idea if this will fix the particular problems with Emacs.app, but it may at least provide an environment closer to what Emacs.app expects.

This is like dimitri's solution, but it handles the case when emacs was launched as emacs --daemon. emacs --daemon makes a hidden window that causes xprop to give a false positive when checking for an existing window.

#!/bin/bash

emacsclient -n -e "(if (> (length (frame-list)) 1) 't)" | grep -q t
if [ "$?" = "1" ]; then
    emacsclient -c -n -a "" "$@"
else
    emacsclient -n -a "" "$@"
fi