Emacs Mac OSX after upgrade to 26.2 launches only in `-nw` mode

Question

I upgraded to Emacs 26.2 on my Mac OSX Sierra instance via "brew".

After the upgrade, the emacs command will not open a new "GUI window", i.e. it runs as if I passed the -nw args or ran it from an ssh session.

I.e. it does not seem to recognize the Mac windowing system:

This behavior has changed since yesterday.

From the docs Using Emacs with X Emacs has been tailored to work well with the X window system. If you run Emacs from under X win- dows, it will create its own X window to display in. You will probably want to start the editor as a background process so that you can continue using your original window.

How can I launch Emacs without it being in terminal (nw) mode?

Answer 1

You want to use the Homebrew cask for Emacs. That will install a "brewed" package of Emacs from https://emacsformacosx.com/.

brew cask install emacs

The "regular" Homebrew package for Emacs is built without GUI support. Via brew edit emacs:

  def install
    args = %W[
      --disable-dependency-tracking
      --disable-silent-rules
      --enable-locallisppath=#{HOMEBREW_PREFIX}/share/emacs/site-lisp
      --infodir=#{info}/emacs
      --prefix=#{prefix}
      --with-gnutls
      --without-x
      --with-xml2
      --without-dbus
      --with-modules
      --without-ns
      --without-imagemagick
    ]

Note the flag --without-ns. This disables the GUI on macOS.

Answer 2

i had the same problem, and tried the solution from @nega but it did not work for me. i am not a homebrew expert, but the command as listed didn't work and i had to use this syntax:

brew install --cask emacs

but like i said, the emacs window didn't open in X11.

i had success with the macports install instead of the homebrew install:

sudo port install emacs +x11

solution courtesy of @mariusm stackoverflow 2016