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I would like to set the shell EDITOR to use the existing running instance of GUI Emacs.

On macOS I can type open -a Emacs file to edit file that way. But how would EDITOR look to work that way?

What does not work: export EDITOR="emacs" # launches new gui emacs export EDITOR="emacsclient" # launches terminal emacs in current shell export EDITOR="open -a Emacs" # quits editing right away

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  • You'll probably want to try out running a daemon and then connecting to it. That should make it easy to pop up a window for editing. open is probably spawning a process and exiting, which tricks programs that run an editor that it's done already. Commented Dec 11, 2017 at 21:57
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    "export EDITOR="emacsclient" # launches terminal emacs in current shell" is noteworthy. That would not work at all unless there was an Emacs server already running. How/where/when are you starting that server? Commented Dec 11, 2017 at 22:48
  • And because this is about OSX: Does M-x emacs-version report the same thing when you run emacs vs when you run emacsclient ? Commented Dec 11, 2017 at 22:50
  • phils, thanks for the tip. indeed, i had a server running that i was not aware of (installed via homebrew). i have now changed EDITOR to emacsclient and now it behaves as i would like. I guess the GUI also runs the server within it. Commented Dec 11, 2017 at 23:09

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Reset to default
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Answering my own question; I had a server running that I was not aware of.

brew services list

After stopping it with brew services stop emacs-plus or brew services stop emacs, I was able to configure the EDITOR with

export EDITOR="emacsclient"

to use the Emacs.app GUI as the server from the shell.

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