Open an empty, brand new file in a new Emacs window, from terminal

Question

I work on a Mac 10.9.5 and use Emacs 24.4 (installed with macports).

This question is related to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27778836/customizing-emacs-open-new-files-tabs-and-properly-storing-back-up-files?noredirect=1#comment43984459_27778836 .There I was advised to split the "whole-question" into different questions, and also post it here, so here is the 1st of 3 emacs related questions, , hopefully in a better format and in a more adequate stack exchange.

open an empty, brand new file in a new Emacs window, from terminal.

at the moment, when I type in my terminal (or XQuartz), for example:

>emacs new.py &
The file ~/new.py does not exist.

which, effectively, does not exist, but I would like Emacs to open an empty file called new.py. Of course, I can always get around by typing:

>emacs &

then start coding and save it as new.py. I simply would like to be able to do that from terminal. Also, once emacs is open, if I type >emacs& on terminal, I "land" in the file already open and I have to do : Cmd-N + C-x C-f to open a brand new file. So my first question is: Is there something to be added to my .emacs file so I open a brand new file from terminal?

Answer 1

I suspect this has to do with the way Emacs is being packaged as an OS X GUI app (MacPorts) and called via an alias. I'm not on an OS X machine at the moment but it looks like the arguments you are passing from the shell are being processed by the OS X opencommand rather than Emacs itself.

The wiki page here http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsForMacOS#toc20 suggests that what you want to do is:

open -a /Applications/MacPorts?Emacs.app <file-name> 

A potentially nicer option would be to start the Emacs GUI app and call (server-start) (say, in your init file) to start a server. Then you can use emacsclient from the shell when you want to open something. Take a look at the Emacs Server manual page for details.

EDIT

For future readers who don't skim the comments below, @Javier solved the problem by defining his own emacs alias to call the app directly, e.g. in .tcshr

alias emacs  /Applications/MacPorts/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs 

Answer 2

You can use:

emacs -a new.py

This creates the new file and opens it in Emacs window.