Open files in Emacs from the Cygwin command line

May 27, 2011 · by nathan · in

I just got this working today. The weirdnesses of Cygwin’s half Unix-half Windows nature had stymied me before, but I’ve prevailed!

I’ve got Gnu Emacs 23.3 for Windows installed in c:/emacs, and a fairly recent install of Cygwin on Windows 7.

Saved this script in ~/cygemacs.sh

#!/usr/bin/bash
c:/emacs/bin/emacsclientw.exe -n -a "c:/emacs/bin/runemacs.exe" `cygpath -wa $@`

Then in my ~/.bashrc:

alias ec="~/cygemacs.sh"

Now I can be all like,

$ ec ~/.minttyrc

And it opens a new frame in my running Emacs (I have (server-start) in my ~/.emacs), or starts Emacs and opens the file if Emacs isn’t running yet.

See also: EmasClient at EmacsWiki.

Bonus tips

Yes I’m still using Subversion but also gitting going with Git.

And courtesy of The Lumber Room, in ~/.bashrc and others:

    export SVN_EDITOR='c:/emacs/bin/emacsclientw.exe -a c:/emacs/bin/runemacs.exe '

And silence that annoying “kill client buffer z0mgbbq?!?” warning:

  (remove-hook 'kill-buffer-query-functions 'server-kill-buffer-query-function)
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