What is the service for? And how to open files from command line into existing gui?

[patmaddox]

From what I can tell, the service runs an emacs daemon that we can connect to using emacsclient, correct? But I think emacsclient is restricted to the terminal version, and there's no way to use the mac GUI? (#398 proposes a change for the app).

Now for a more practical question: I have launched emacs GUI from Terminal (because if don't do it from Terminal, I don't have a useful path... seems to be a pretty common issue). Now I want to edit another file in my existing GUI – is there a terminal command that I can run that will open the file in the existing GUI? As of now I copy the file path from terminal, switch to emacs, and open the file from within emacs... I'd like to be able to do emacs file (or whatever the command is) and have it load in the GUI. Can I do that?

[d12frosted]

Disclaimer: as a person who doesn't use Emacs server I find it difficult to reason about its capabilities and use cases.

From quick testing, I can say that emacsclient supports GUI as well. There is an option -nw to run in non-GUI mode. To test this, I started Emacs.app normally, run M-x server-start and then connected to the server from terminal using emacsclient -s SOCKET some-file. It opened some-file in my GUI Emacs that I used to start the server. Had to put SOCKET manually, because I never configured server thing to work manually. I took the value of server-socket-dir to find path to the socket file.

because if don't do it from Terminal, I don't have a useful path... seems to be a pretty common issue

Yes, this is pretty annoying. But this is how .app works on macOS. Though for Emacs there are several solutions. A general one is exec-path-from-shell which updates PATH in the Emacs.app process. And also
emacs-plus@29 now injects your PATH into Info.plist file of Emacs.app, meaning that it should work in most of the cases even without exec-path-from-shell (see #453).

Now I want to edit another file in my existing GUI – is there a terminal command that I can run that will open the file in the existing GUI? [...] Can I do that?

emacsclient itself :) You just need to configure socket location, so you don't have to manually provide it every time.

P.S. Making server experience better in emacs-plus is on my radar.

[patmaddox]

Now I want to edit another file in my existing GUI – is there a terminal command that I can run that will open the file in the existing GUI? [...] Can I do that?

emacsclient itself :) You just need to configure socket location, so you don't have to manually provide it every time.

Ah I wasn't clear – I thought I would be able to use brew services start emacs-plus, and then run emacsclient myfile to launch a GUI version of Emacs on that file.

You're right that if I start GUI emacs, and then m-x emacs-server, and then emacsclient myfile that it will reuse that GUI.

I had assumed that the brew service would produce an "always on" emacs that also supported GUI. It seems that that's not the case, and that the service produces a terminal-only version.

[mjgiffin]

Trying to weigh the pros and cons of using the service vs launchd with the included .plist file:

• service will start emacs daemon at boot
• launchd will start emacs daemon at logon
  Anything else to consider?

To use emacsclient with the GUI, use emacsclient -c. You can also make an Automator application and put it in /Applications.

[patmaddox]

To use emacsclient with the GUI, use emacsclient -c.

Right you are!

I usually only want one emacs frame. So I'd need to do some sort of check to see if there's a GUI frame, in which case I can reuse it. If not, I should -c to make a new one. If there's no GUI frame, then emacsclient will make (or connect to?) a terminal frame.