Starting Emacs in GUI with shell environment variables correctly set

Tuto.md

Problem

When starting Emacs.app on Mac, the Emacs doesn't have some environment variable set correctly. Typically it is terrible when you use GPG, pinentry-mac, gpg-agent But also a lot of different variables used to make git works correctly, etc...

Solution

1. Create the file ~/bin/init-app-env.sh:

   #!/usr/bin/env zsh
   source ~/.zshrc
   for i in $(export); do
       var=$(echo $i|sed 's/=.*//')
       val=$(echo $i|sed 's/^[^=]*=//')
       [[ $val != "" ]] && {
           launchctl setenv $var $val
       }
   done

   If you use bash you can safely replace zshrc by bashrc in the script.

2. Create a file ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.user.loginscript.plist (replace ME by your login name):

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
   <plist version="1.0">
   	<dict>
   		<key>Label</key>
   		<string>com.user.loginscript</string>
   		<key>Program</key>
   		<string>/Users/ME/bin/init-app-env.sh</string>
   		<key>RunAtLoad</key>
   		<true/>
   	</dict>
   </plist>

3. Run in a Terminal

   launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.user.loginscript.plist
   

Congrats!

Now at each login the script will run with your zsh environment. Beware, it can take a few seconds before the script is launched. So don't rush to launch Emacs.app just after login.