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This has got to be a silly question...

From a terminal window, to start emacs which comes with mac osx (version 22.1.1), I just type

> emacs

First set of questions: where is this emacs installed? where is the alias defined?

Now, I just discovered (!) how old this version is, and so I installed the latest version from http://emacsformacosx.com. When I type 

> emacs

I still launch the old version (22.1.1) and not the new one. On the other hand, if I type in a terminal window

open -a emacs

then the new version (25.3.1) is launched.

Second set of questions: why is that? where is the alias for this other emacs? how does the system choose which version to launch?

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2 Answers 2

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2

It is one question per customer / thread ...

As to the first question, the great thing about Emacs from https://emacsformacosx.com/ is that it is a self-contained installation. The executable is inside the packaged Emacs.app wherever you installed it.

If you placed the Emacs.app inside the root /Applications folder, then your path to the Emacs executable is: /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs

If you placed the Emacs.app inside the root /Applications folder, then your path to the emacsclient executable is: /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient

[Within ../Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/.. I see multiple different builds for various versions of OSX. I have only ever used the generic executables at the paths listed above. Feel free to try out an OSX version specific executable that matches your system version type ...]

OSX ships with an outdated version of Emacs with an absolute path of /usr/bin/emacs

You can always type the absolute path in the terminal to the desired Emacs executable, or you can set up an alias (which is a different question beyond the scope of the one question per customer / thread general rule).

For the location of executables within the $PATH of the terminal, you can type which NAME_OF_EXECUTABLE -- in this example, typing which emacs in the terminal produces a result of /usr/bin/emacs.

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  • Thanks, that helps a lot! Sorry, I was only being rhetorical when I asked "two" questions. There really was only one: how do two versions of emacs coexist. As to creating an alias, note that I did not ask the question how to do that in the post, as evidently this is a completely different question - and one that has nothing to do with emacs (in fact like my original question(s)!)
    – Antoine
    Commented Feb 21, 2018 at 23:12
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I don't know how the system knows which version to launch, but to open the newly installed Emacs from terminal, type emacs23.

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  • I would still like to understand how things work. In fact, when I type emacs23, it doesn't work, because I haven't defined the alias emacs23 for the version of emacs that I want. And that brings another question, which is where and how to define such aliases, but I have to dig a little bit more before posting a question...
    – Antoine
    Commented Feb 21, 2018 at 12:19

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