Alieniloquent

There’s this feature of TextMate that a lot of people like: the mate command. It opens up the file or directory you pass to it in your running TextMate instance.

This sort of feature isn’t anything new. Emacs has had this feature for a long time. You just add this snippet to your to your init.el:

(emacs-server)

Then you can use emacsclient to send files to it the same way. However, on my mac this wasn’t working. The trick, it seems, is making sure you use the correct emacsclient.

About a year ago, Emacs.app was merged into the main-line GNU Emacs. So you can build a completely Cocoa-based version of the very latest GNU Emacs right out of CVS. If you do that, an emacsclient executable is included in the application bundle.

You can write a little shell script, we’ll call it eopen:

#!/bin/sh

# Send the file to our running Emacs and bring it to the foreground.
/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient -n "${1}" \
  2> /dev/null \
  && open -a Emacs

# If that failed, then open a new emacs visiting the file.
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
  EOPEN_DIR="${PWD}" EOPEN_FILE="${1}" open -a Emacs
fi

Now, you’ll notice that in the failure case, my script sets some environment variables and just opens Emacs. Those environment variables aren’t anything special. In fact, unless you add some code to your init.el all you’ll get is a fresh Emacs open to whatever default buffer you usually see.

So, add the following to your init.el:

(let ((dir (getenv "EOPEN_DIR"))
      (file (getenv "EOPEN_FILE")))
  (if dir
      (cd dir))
  (if file
      (find-file file)))

Then, when you have those environment variables set (such as in the shell script), emacs will open up a buffer on the file or directory passed in as an argument to the script. This hack is there so that you can use eopen to open non-existent files in addition to existent files (open complains if the file does not exist). Subsequent calls to the script can just use emacsclient.