External Editor: Why is the wrong of two app versions on my system chosen?

mediapathic

This one is a bit odd...

I have two versions of emacs on my machine. I had been using one downloaded from emacsformacosx.com, but I switched to another build, because of Mysterious Emacs Reasons. Currently my Applications directory contains both "emacs" (the one I actually use) and "emacs_safe", the old version that I renamed in case I needed it back.

I have selected "emacs" as one of the external editors. Every time I try to open a file with it, it opens with "emacs_safe" instead. All other external editors seem to work fine.

Yes I know the actual solution is "have one emacs installation like a reasonable person" but I think the fact that this is happening may point to something else y'all might want to address.

Thanks!

ctietze

Oh shoot, that's not a lot we can do about it Apps do have so called unique bundle identifiers, and you apparently un-uniqued them in the case of emacs. These are used by The Archive to ask the OS to launch apps independent from their location.

The only way to change the bundle ID is to change the CFBundleIdentifier value in an application bundle's Info.plist. This is totally doable, but depending on the security settings of your Mac, your macOS might not want to run the resulting app bundle anymore at all.

That being said, since can probably built both from source anyway, the problem of invalid code signing should not be an issue when the app bundle was assembled locally.

mediapathic

Ah ok! I'm cool with working around it locally for as long as I feel like I need that old install (I should probably just get rid of it, honestly), just making sure it's nothing you need to care about.

(Feel free to mark as resolved)