Yesterday Emacs 26.2 was released, see: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/news/NEWS.26.2

In this short guide i want to show how i install Emacs on my MacBook. I use the vanilla Emacs build from https://emacsformacosx.com/. It is just a simple .dmg file.

After installing the dmg file, Emacs is now available on your Mac as an application but not in the terminal-app. The terminal still opens the pre-install Emacs version. To make the new version available you have to create a bash-script and put it in your $PATH.

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# filename ~/bin/emacs

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

Put the emacsclient command in your $PATH too. Just run the following line:

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

For further information see: https://emacsformacosx.com/tips

My Emacs startup workflow

When i start a session i run the emacs-server with emacs --daemon. This runs emacs in the background. Afterwards you can use emacsclient to open files. From now on emacsclient does not startup a full Emacs instance but utilises the running emacs-server. Basically emacs opens instantly!

Additionally i created some bash aliases in my ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc in order to shorten the emacs commands.

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# filename ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc

alias edd='emacs --daemon'  # start emacs server in background
alias e='emacsclient -t'  # open emacs in terminal
alias ecc='emacsclient -c' # open GUI-emacs
alias ew='emacs -nw -q'   # opens vanilla emacs in the terminal

Finally i made Emacs the standard-editor in the shell. This makes other terminal-applications use Emacs, e.g. git for editing git-commit-messages.

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# filename: ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc

export EDITOR="emacs -q -nw"  # make emacs my default editor in the terminal