Emacs, OS X and the EDITOR variable

This took a bit of fiddling to get right, so I offer it up to the Great Google Index with the hope that it may save someone else some time. The EDITOR environment variable is what is used by Unix applications (such as Subversion and git) when they want to start an editor for input. Starting emacs from the command line in OS X uses the open command.

To get this working with emacs and OS X Leopard I had to make the file /usr/bin/emacs contain:

#!/bin/sh
open -nWa /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs "$@"

This opens a file using a new instance of emacs and waits until emacs exits.