Mac – How to set the initial window position in Cocoa emacs

The emacs way to open files into emacs is to use emacsclient from the command line. This requires that emacs is running the emacs server (using M-x server-start or put (server-start) into your .emacs file).

I've got this in my .bashrc (adapt for zsh as appropriate):

alias em='emacsclient -n'

I'm running GNU Emacs 23.1.50.5 (built from CVS last week sometime) and this version brings my emacs window to front.

If you're opening and exiting emacs for each file you edit, you're not taking full advantage of emacs' possibilities. I typically start emacs shortly after a reboot and it stays open until the next Mac software update requires a reboot.

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