So I'm getting some pretty strange behaviour when I try to use an Automator service to open new emacs (GNU Version 25.2 with spacemacs) buffers.
In my terminal, the command emacsclient -a '' -c works as expected, opening a new buffer through emacsclient. However, when I make a service in Automator which simply runs a (/bin/bash) shell script:
emacsclient -a '' -c
I get an error message:
The action “Run Shell Script” encountered an error: “emacsclient: could not get terminal name”
On suspicions that this was due to Automator not using some default PATH variable, I tried the following instead:
PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH
emacsclient -c
which produced the same error as before.
Next I tried
PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin export PATH;
emacsclient -c
which produced a different error message:
The action “Run Shell Script” encountered an error: “emacsclient: invalid option -- c
Try `emacsclient --help' for more information”
however why I try that script in my terminal it also gives a similar error which doesn't make much sense to me.
If anyone has suggestions for how to fix this I'd really appreciate it.
The problem is the shell script is running an old version of emacsclient in /usr/bin you need to run the one in Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient. Delete the PATH line and you can use a solution listed here for running emacsclient inside automator Running a macOS service for open with emacs failed with "emacsclient: could not get terminal name mac"