5

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?

2
  • 1
    Are you sure you're using the Homebrew version of Emacs and not the Apple provided version (22.1.1) at /usr/bin/emacs?
    – nega
    Apr 15, 2019 at 19:58
  • 1
    You may also want to look at the Homebrew cask, emacs. This will give you a nicely "brewed" package from emacsformacosx.com. Install it with brew cask install emacs
    – nega
    Apr 15, 2019 at 20:03

2 Answers 2

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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.

2
  • Woohoo! back in business! I do wonder "what changed" for me over the last day. Also, I lost my default font settings, but a small price to pay for "ctrl-k to the clipboard"
    – user331465
    Apr 16, 2019 at 2:05
  • I had a similar problem, but brew claimed Emacs was already installed this way. Reinstalling fixed it. No idea why. IIRC I could still get GUI emacs by launching from Spotlight, but not from Terminal.
    – Cyberthal
    Mar 21, 2021 at 20:44
0

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

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