I put this little script my PATH so that I can call emacs from the command line and have it launch Emacs.app and not the built in emacs.

emacs

#!/bin/sh
/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs "$@"

So you're saying that

cd ~/developer/project
emacs relative/path

tries to open ~/relative/path?

I just tried the same thing and it was working for me. I'm not sure what could causing that. Perhaps something in your .emacs file? Try with emacs -q and see if you get the same behavior.

I suggest using

#!/bin/sh
open -a Emacs "$@"

instead because it also works when Emacs is already open (the one above makes a second Emacs app show up in my Dock). It also seems to be better than

#!/bin/sh
which osascript > /dev/null 2>&1 && osascript -e 'tell application "Emacs" to activate'
emacsclient -c "$@"

or similar emacsclient stuff because it also works when Emacs is not running. The last one only opens Emacs but does not open the file when Emacs is not running.

@caldwell , could you update the Tips And Tricks to also mention that the script should be executable chmod +x emacs
else it won't work.

For everyone else, I've gone a different route that mimics the way other apps create references in the path:

(make sure to use a user account that can become superuser/admin)

sudo ln -s /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs /usr/local/bin/emacs

This way you don't have to worry about cli args as the original executable will take care of it.

@naxels Yeah, that's probably much easier. I've changed it.