After almost 15 years of running emacs predominantly on linux in terminal mode, I am planning on switching my workflow completely to MacOS. At the same time, I have experimented with the capabilities of emacs running in a window/graphical system instead of the terminal interface. Both experiences have been pleasant so far, particularly the fact that I can now view images in emacs buffers :-O However, there have been some issues that I have had to address, so here it goes.

Operating emacs in a window-system

A lot of flows in emacs depend on things like environmental variables being set correctly. My current bash setup involves a .profile file that specifies stuff like the PATH and GOPATH, AWS_* variables, various aliases, shell customizations (such as PS1) as well as rvm-related functionality. The .profile file is sourced in .bashrc, so a login shell is needed to get all these declarations in the environment.

One of the first things I noticed when running emacs on the MacOS window-system (C-h v window-system) was the fact that the environment in emacs was pretty much void of all my customizations. So, for example the projectile-compile-project command in a go project failed with errors indicating that the environment is not setup correctly (GOPATH not defined, dep located in /usr/local/bin was not found etc.).

And indeed it makes sense for the environment to be void; why should it be otherwise? When the application starts in a window system, there is no reason why the custom bash initialization should be executed in the context of the application. This should be true in all window systems, not just MacOS (ns).

It turns out that this problem can be solved using the exec-path-from-shell package. This package essentially executes a shell, grabs the values of certain environmental variables (which can be customized as well) and sets them (setenv) in the current environment in which emacs is operating.

Add the following in your emacs initialization file to get the package working:

;; this will make sure that the package is installed during emacs init
(use-package exec-path-from-shell
  :ensure t)

;; this will initialize the package only when a window-system is detected
(when (memq window-system '(mac ns x))
  (exec-path-from-shell-initialize))

Supporting multiple system-types in init.el

Now, going back to the issue of switching emacs usage from linux to MacOS, I would very much like to support both systems in a single init.el because some usage on linux is to be expected after all. For functionality that differs across the two systems, emacs provides the variable system-type (C-h v system-type).

For example, to use the badger theme on MacOS only one needs to do the following in init.el:

(if (eq system-type 'darwin)
    (load-theme 'badger t))

So, using the system-type variable, one can execute lisp code conditionally upon the type of the system in which emacs is running.