Making the PATH and other environment variables available in emacs

Question

Working with emacs in OSX can some times be troubling.

I interchange with using the Terminal.app application and the emace shell both of these use bash, and

Answer 1

If your environment variables are being set in ~/.bash_profile, Create a file called ~/.emacs_bash and put in it the following:

. ~/.bash_profile

Don't forget the newline at the end of that line or it won't be executed.

~/.emacs_bash is loaded by emacs when you run bash from within it, such as when using M-x shell or shell-command so you can use it to set any environment variables you want available.

Answer 2

Just install the awesome little package exec-path-from-shell and you're done! It will automatically set your emacs exec-path to be same as the PATH in your zsh/bash config.

It will also allow you to copy the values of other shell variables like this:

(exec-path-from-shell-copy-env "PYTHONPATH")

Answer 3

As of 2019, exec-path-from-shell will only pass PATH to Emacs, If you want to pass all environments, you can try:

• https://github.com/ersiner/osx-env-sync/

Answer 4

Open Emacs.app from within Terminal.app (instead of from Finder):

$ emacs

This works for me using Emacs from Homebrew with Cocoa (brew install emacs --with-cocoa). It launches Emacs.app in a Cocoa GUI window (use emacs -nw to fallback to terminal UI). All the environment variables I have set in my bash environment appeared to be set in Emacs.

I have not tried this with Emacsformacosx. I personally prefer Emacs from Homebrew as I heard Emacsformacosx is not compiled with certain extensions I use such as TLS and Imagemagick... you can compile Emacs with those extensions using brew install emacs --with-XXX.