How can I most effectively use Emacs as an editor alongside XCode?

Question

There are a few tutorials online (For example) having to do with configuring emacs to work with XCode, but they all seem to be for old versions, and I haven't found one that ties neatly to XCode 3.x + Emacs 23.1 in a way that I can unpack.

So, I'm running XCode 3.1.2 and the Mac Cocoa application build of Emacs 23.1. I have a passing familiarity with elisp, so modifying configurations doesn't scare me, particularly. I'd like to be editing my Objective-C code in Emacs, because the XCode editor is painful once you've used a real text editor (snark, snark).

What should I do to make this happen?

Answer 1

Well, the customization should be similar to the documentation you pointed to. With Emacs 23, the server/client code has changed just a little. Namely, you can start it with the [--daemon][1] option to have Emacs start a server in the background. Then, have XCode just call Emacs using [emacsclient][2]. There are options you can use with emacsclient to force a new frame (graphical window): -c, and you can even start it off with -a to ensure you get an emacs if you forgot to start it with --daemon.

Answer 2

For Emacs.app you can adopt a cleaner approach, and it doesn't require you to change configurations (unless you don't like make-frame to be called when a file is opened from XCode, but it's very easy to change).