Setting up Emacs daemon on OS X

Emacs.md

Setting up Emacs daemon on OS X

Tired of waiting for emacs to start on OS X? This step by step guide will teach you how to install the latest version of emacs and configure it to start in the background (daemon mode) and use emacsclient as your main editor.

Install Cocoa Emacs

Download the latest pretest version of [Emacs for Mac OS X]: http://emacsformacosx.com/builds

Drag the Emacs Application to your Applications folder

Create the daemon application

Open the AppleScript editor and paste the following:

tell application "Terminal"
do shell script "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs --daemon"
end tell

Save this as an Application called "Emacs Daemon" in your Applications folder

Add as a login item

Goto System Preferences > Accounts

• With your user name selected, click on the Login Items tab
• Click on the plus sign
• Browse to your applications folder and find "Emacs Daemon"
• Don't worry about the "hide" checkbox, since it the dock icon disappears naturally

Create the client application

Open the AppleScript editor and paste the following:

tell application "Terminal"
try
set frameVisible to do shell script "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient -e '(<= 2 (length (visible-frame-list)))'"
if frameVisible is not "t" then
do shell script "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient -c -n"
end if
on error
do shell script "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs --daemon"
do shell script "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient -c -n"
end try
end tell
tell application "Emacs" to activate

Save this as an Application called "Emacs Client" in your Applications folder.

Giving the client application a proper icon

Using the Finder, navigate to your Application folder and right click on your Emacs application (not the client or daemon), and click on Show Package Contents Do the same for the Emacs Client application

Copy the Emacs.icns file from Contents/Resources of the Emacs application to the Contents/Resources of the Emacs Client application Delete applet.icns and rename Emacs.icns to applet.icns in the Emacs Client application.

This is great! There's only one thing I haven't been able to solve so far. When the Emacs daemon starts running it doesn't show up on the dock (which is good). But after I run Emacs Client for the first time, even when I close the last window (or frame) the Emacs icon still shows up on the dock.

Do you know of any way to make the Emacs icon disappear of the dock (and most importantly, the cmd-tab menu) when no GUI client is running?

Cheers.

No, there were a couple of problems I never solved with this. That was one of them. I also ran into a problem occasionally where things didn't get cleaned up properly, and I had to manually kill emacs. It was something in my emacs config that didn't agree with it. I'm currently not using this solution, and am just manually running emacs with a call to (server-start) in my init.el. That's been working for me.

…

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 9:40 PM, Andr Silva < ***@***.*** > wrote: This is great! There's only one thing I haven't been able to solve so far. When the Emacs daemon starts running it doesn't show up on the dock (which is good). But, after the first I run Emacs Client for the first time, even when I close the last window (or frame) the Emacs icon still shows up on the dock. Do you know of any way to make the Emacs icon disappear of the dock (and most importantly, the cmd-tab menu) when no GUI client is running? Cheers. --- Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://gist.github.com/1394910

Do you mind elaborating a bit on your alternative? I'm an emacs newbie and I didn't quite get it. Could you describe the workflow of how you start emacs and emacs clients? I've added (server-start) to my init.el but after I close the last frame the server does not keep running in the background, the app is simply killed. Also, even if the app isn't killed and the server keeps running in the background, does the Emacs icon still persist in the dock?

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 10:07 PM, Andr Silva < ***@***.*** > wrote: I've added (server-start) to my init.el but after I close the last frame the server does not keep running in the background, the app is simply killed. Also, even if the app isn't killed and the server keeps running in the background, does the Emacs icon still persist in the dock?

No, this is how I use Emacs now. I just never close down emacs anymore and keep connecting to the same running session.

Oh okay, got it ;-) Thanks for your help.

Thanks for sharing this gist. I have one question against the .emacs configuration file, I find the emacs client didn't read the .emacs configuration file when it starts. Do you aware of this issue or not? I guess most emacs users have got a lot of personized configurations, which are important. If they are not loaded automatically by the emacs client, it will be very pity.

Starting with Yosemite, "Applescript Editor" became "Script Editor" and in order to create an Application package, you have to create a new "Cocoa-AppleScript Applet." Otherwise it will only create a scpt file instead of an app folder with an icon file, etc.

You can also add the icon from within the script editor if you want (see here).

https://github.com/Tristan79/iBrew/blob/master/source/distro/mac/Info.plist#L5

• Add this line to the info.plist file for the Emacs app, now the icon disappeared.
• Additional note: this gist created 6 years ago, I was dubious of it's accuracy, but it's still working for me today 2018-02-23!

Great instruction. My only issue is if Emacs Daemon is already running, the script causes an error. Is there a way to include a condition to not run the deamon if it is already running?

I put this together so I only need one script. It looks for emacsclient to throw an error and if it does then it starts emacs --daemon and then runs emacsclient. Should solve your issue @x61.

try
	tell application "Terminal"
		do shell script "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient -c"
	end tell
on error
	tell application "Terminal"
		do shell script "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs --daemon"
		do shell script "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient -c"
	end tell
end try

I put this together so I only need one script. It looks for emacsclient to throw an error and if it does then it starts emacs --daemon and then runs emacsclient. Should solve your issue @x61.

try
	tell application "Terminal"
		do shell script "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient -c"
	end tell
on error
	tell application "Terminal"
		do shell script "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs --daemon"
		do shell script "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient -c"
	end tell
end try

@kevinjfoley Why not use the -a option for emacsclient?

Thanks for sharing this and all your discussion.
I had the problem Emacs daemon was not terminated so that I had to manually kill it.
The reason was I had put the following code in my init.el to confirm saving buffers before quit Emacs.

(setq confirm-kill-emacs 'yes-or-no-p)

After removing the code, this not-terminating issue was gone!
Currently I turn on the confirm code when Emacs is started by non-daemon mode.

(if (daemonp)
    nil
  (setq confirm-kill-emacs 'yes-or-no-p))

It works, the only thing is that there is a typo in the scripts:

endtell -> end tell

I add an additional argument while launching emacsclient: --create-frame to create a new frame whenever i call the application.

If using homebrew to install emacs you can now use brew services which installs a launch agent plist for the current user

If using homebrew to install emacs you can now use brew services which installs a launch agent plist for the current user

Is this suitable for Doom Emacs? I mean It's probably is but I wonder If the Doom configuration will be affected from this.

Im using brew installed emacs-plus and use brew services to start the emacs as service.
By default, it does start as foreground application. I changed it background daemon by edit this file directly.

/opt/homebrew/Cellar/emacs-plus@29/29.3/homebrew.mxcl.emacs-plus@29.plist

Looking for this section

<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
  <string>/opt/homebrew/opt/emacs-plus@29/bin/emacs</string>
  <string>--daemon</string>
</array>