Emacs Daemon Multiple user on Mac best practices

Question

I'm new to Emacs, so apologies if this is covered elsewhere.

I'm running latest macOS 12.4; and downloaded emacs.app from emacsformacosx.com so I'm on Emacs 28.1-4 .

I have an admin user, which I almost never login as via GUI (basically, only for major system updates).

I have (at least) 2 standard users, let's call them user.home and user.work .

I could run a per user instance of emacs daemon by putting the relevant plist in each ~/Library/LaunchAgents. Does doing this run a risk of clobbering any files?

Or, could I run a single per machine instance by putting the relevant plist in /Library/LaunchDaemons. This seems more efficient, but then which user should own the process, and where should I place my .emacs.d/init.el and friends?

Can I have a very basic set up for the machine daemon, and a customised init.el on a per user basis which could be read by emacsclient?

I think all the documentation for Emacs on Mac assumes that one is running as a single admin user (this is true for brew and others too I notice) but again apologies if this is all obvious!

Lastly, are there any limitations to running emacs as client/server? For example, can one persuade emacsclient to remember desktop state?

Answer 1

If you put it in as a LaunchDaemon, it would run as root (or whatever the equivalent on OSX is; I don’t use it). You don’t want to do that. Let each user run their own daemon. The answer to rest of your questions is whatever is most favorable; you’re not going to break anything by doing that and Emacs features all just work how you would expect them to work. Don’t forget that Emacs comes with a set of manuals. You can type C-h i to open them inside of Emacs.