Emacs daemon on macOS

How many packages do you load at Emacs startup? Me? Lots. I’m not a big fan of hanging around for 8 whole seconds for them to load when I want to edit a file. So, what are the options?

• Run Emacs at Login. Get a coffee while it loads.
• Run the Emacs daemon as a LaunchAgent.
• I think I’ll talk about that one. 🙂

To run the Emacs daemon (day-mon, btw. A friendly spirit.) at login, you need to create a plist in ~/Library/LaunchAgents. You can try to find the Apple documentation on the necessary XML to use, or you can copy the following code. I named my file gnu.emacs.daemon.plist. I know; how original. Just change the UserName key field of course.

 

That’s it. Now log out, then log in. Or you can face Cupertino and issue the following incantation.

launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/gnu.emacs.daemon.plist

(you can change load to unload then load again if you need to debug)

How do you know it did anything? The daemon creates a socket file named emacs[your uid]/server. You can do a ps/grep cha cha if you want. I check Emacs’s (say that 3 times fast) open files. (List the files opened by Emacs, then grep for “server”. Then squeeze all the blanks into one so cut works, then get field 8 – the file name)

lsof -c Emacs | grep server | tr -s “[:blank:]” | cut -d’ ‘ -f8

You should get back the socket file. Mine looked like this just now. Yours might have a different path and user uid (mine is 501. See yours by typing id in iterm)

/var/folders/ff/3mb9tb5s167_hwm9sn3_c5dr0000gn/T/emacs501/server

Now what? Use emacsclient.

In my zsh setup files I created an alias to it. You can type the whole path out if you don’t want to bother with silly things like aliases.

alias emacsclient=/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient

Now you’e set. Run emacsclient and specify the socket file on the command line.

emacsclient –create-frame –socket-name=/var/folders/ff/3mb9tb5s167_hwm9sn3_c5dr0000gn/T/emacs501/server

Woo hoo!

I’m not telling you what to do, but I wrote a shell script to get the socket file name then launch emacsclient.