How can I run Mac OSX graphical Emacs in daemon mode?

Question

Short form: I want to run the Mac OSX version of Emacs found on http://emacsformacosx.com/ as a daemon, with graphical and text clients connecting to it as-needed.

In detail, here is the workflow I want:

1. On login, run /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs --daemon to start emacs as a daemon. I already know how to do this.

2. When running emacs from a local termnal, I want Either one of these:

   1. If I run emacs from a local command prompt, open a new frame with the selected file.
   2. If #1 is not possible, at least if I run emacsclient from the command line, open a new frame with the selected file.

3. When running emacs from a remote terminal, I would like a text-mode emacs to start, connected to the daemon process.

4. If I run Emacs.app re-use the emacs daemon that is running in the background instead of starting a new instance and open a new window on it.

So far, I am able to accomplish only #1 and #2.2 above, but those are the easy parts. #3 and #4 are the things that are most needed in order to make this work. Does anyone know how to accomplish these things?

Answer 1

1. You've got this handled

2. Yes, you'll want to use emacsclient. To get a new frame, add the -c option. I have an alias to make it quicker and to tell emacsclient not to wait for emacs server to return:

   alias em='emacsclient -n'

3. emacsclient -nw
4. I'm not sure about this. I start Emacs once and always load new files either within emacs or using my "em" alias.

Update:

Check out this tip documenting how to use Platypus to create an app wrapper around emacsclient. You could then use "Open With..." to launch using your new app wrapper.

Answer 2

Yes, here is an pretty comprehensive explain about how to do this nicely. I tried several methods to get it working nicely, but no better than what they described here.

https://gist.github.com/304964

Cheers!