How to use emacsclient in terminal to switch git branches?

Question

I'm trying to make a setup that will use emacs as a command line tool to switch git branches.

The idea is to run some command in terminal, something like emacsclient -t -e "(magit-checkout)". This will run emacs window with (magit-checkout) command executed in my terminal. I can then select a branch from the list, press enter, emacs will then checkout this branch, window will close and I'm back to my terminal.

I can't make it work though, running emacsclient -t -e "(magit-checkout)" just flashes emacs window in my terminal and closes it immediately. It works almost as I want it to work with (magit-commit) command (the only thing that doesn't work is that emacs window won't close after the operation is done). But it doesn't work with (magit-checkout). Is there any way to make it work the way I described?

Answer 1

As outlined in the comments by others you can use something like:

 emacsclient -t -e "(call-interactively #'magit-checkout)" -e "(delete-frame)"

Of course you would have to create a script or alias for that.

But like the users who have commented on your questions, I too would recommend using either plain old git checkout or going all in with Magit, doing everything from there. If you stick to the former, then you should look into teaching Zsh's completion mechanism about fuzzy matching - I would assume that that is possible somehow.