Emacs Plus

If you're using Emacs on MacOS, chances are you're using the one from Emacs-For-Mac-OSX website. This makes getting it so easy because there are no official binaries available for mac and you can be sure that you're getting vanila emacs, without anything added or removed. That's excellent.

The binary offered there is a little behind because it only tracks the latest stable release, which is 28.2 at the moment. The bleeding edge of emacs is at version 30. The new version has a bunch of improvements and some exciting new features.

So I decided that I wanted to build Emacs from scratch. While looking for the easiest way to do it, I discovered d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus¹, which is a hombrew recipe to easily build Emacs from scratch. This recipe lets you throw in several flags to tailor the build to your preference. The one that I really love is the --with-no-frame-refocus flag. This stops existing Emacs frame from stealing focus when you close another Emacs frame.

Another interesting one is the --with-native-comp flag. This adds the ability to compile emacs lisp as native code in Emacs. Which presumably improves performance. I'll try this some time in the future when I have enough time.

Installing

Add the homebrew tap

brew tap d12frosted/emacs-plus

Then run:

brew install emacs-plus@30 --with-no-frame-refocus --with-imagemagick --with-xwidgets --with-native-comp

This will download and build emacs from source so it can take a while.

After it's done, link it to the /Applications directory.

ln -s /opt/homebrew/opt/emacs-plus@30/Emacs.app /Applications

For some reason I wasn't able to launch Emacs from spotlight even after linking it like this. I decided to start using emacsclient instead.

Using emacsclient

Start the homebrew service first using this command and connect to it from the command line using emacsclient -c.

brew services start emacs-plus@30

It works like a charm. Emacs client loads up quite fast because it's simply connecting to the running editor daemon.

I've avoided this type of setup for a while because there are certain caveats to consider. For example, changing config and restarting becomes a bit of a hassle, you can't just close and open Emacs. I have a habit of restarting emacs if I change something that can't be loaded with a simple C-x C-e. Example: immediately after removing an add-hook function call. The hook will still be registered in memory unless you manually remove it using remove-hook command or do a full restart.

I also restart to ensure that I have a working setup the next time I start Emacs (sometimes in a different computer after syncing config). This I can test with a new Emacs instance by running emacs from he command line after each config change. So it's not a big deal.

Another issue I ran into was that emacs daemon didn't load my environment variables in my .zshrc. Which was slightly confusing since I am using exec-path-from-shell package already. Turns out I had it configured to only read environment variables when launching Emacs directly like this.

(use-package exec-path-from-shell
  :ensure t
  :init
  (when (memq window-system '(mac ns x)))

I changed it to always be invoked and that did the trick.

(use-package exec-path-from-shell
  :ensure t
  :init
  (exec-path-from-shell-initialize))

Launching from spotlight

Create a shortcut via Automator with the Run Shell Script task and move the file to /Applications directory. The shell command should look like this.²

/opt/homebrew/bin/emacsclient \
    --no-wait \
    --quiet \
    --suppress-output \
    --create-frame \
    "$@"