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How I run emacs in client/server mode under macOS

Posted on Nov 30, 2020

Many articles are available about running Emacs in client/server mode. However, when I tried to do it in my particular environment (macOS 11.0.1 Big Sur, using zsh), some tweaks were still needed. So I figured that it’s probably useful to document my setup. In macOS, the Emacs executable is /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs. To run Emacs in its regular (non-server) operation mode, I defined two shell commands in .zshrc: emacs runs Emacs in GUI mode in a macOS window, whereas emacsnw runs Emacs in text mode within the terminal.