Bring Emacs to the foreground on macOS Catalina
I have been using Emacs for a few months, I always keep one instance and use a global shortcut key cmd + e to open or switch it to the foreground.
I did it with Karabiner-Element key mapping
{
"from": {
"key_code": "e",
"modifiers": {
"mandatory": [
"right_command"
]
}
},
"to": [
{
"shell_command": "open -a 'emacs'"
}
],
"type": "basic"
}
Recently I upgraded the macOS to Catalina and found the open -a emacs can not bring it to foreground anymore. I spent hours searching with google until I found this post(https://spin.atomicobject.com/2019/12/12/fixing-emacs-macos-catalina/).
As explained in the post, I never noticed the binary in Emacs.app is actually a ruby script which was working before Catalina, but now the OS fails to bring it to the front as the binary doesn't match the ruby script.
I tried the workaround mentioned in the post above and figured out I need to use Emacs-x86_64-10_10 instead.
% cd /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS_
% mv Emacs Emacs-launcher
% mv Emacs-x86_64-10_10 Emacs
% cd /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/
% rm -rf _CodeSignatureHowever, I still get some dependencies errors after the renaming,
Warning: arch-dependent data dir '/Users/build/workspace/Emacs-Multi-Build/label/mavericks/emacs-source/nextstep/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/libexec/': No such file or directory
Warning: arch-independent data dir '/Users/build/workspace/Emacs-Multi-Build/label/mavericks/emacs-source/nextstep/Emacs.app/Contents/Resources/etc/': No such file or directory
Warning: Lisp directory '/Users/build/workspace/Emacs-Multi-Build/label/mavericks/emacs-source/nextstep/Emacs.app/Contents/Resources/lisp': No such file or directory
Error: charsets directory not found:
/Users/build/workspace/Emacs-Multi-Build/label/mavericks/emacs-source/nextstep/Emacs.app/Contents/Resources/etc/charsets
Emacs will not function correctly without the character map files.
Please check your installation!After another round of searching, I ended up with a solution according to the suggestion here: https://github.com/caldwell/build-emacs/issues/57. I put the following alias to my zshrc and everything returns to normal as before.
alias emacs=/Application/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs
Hopefully, this post would also help anybody who is suffering the same wacky issue as me.