[OS X Emacs] Re: Environment variables and Aquamacs 2.0

[David Reitter]

On May 26, 2010, at 4:10 PM, Erik Husby wrote:
> 
> If Aquamacs is started from clicking on an icon, in the Macintosh world that should mean it gets environment variables from environment.plist like other Macintosh applications.
> 
> If Aquamacs is started from the command line then it should inherit the environment variables set by the shell used to start it.

As a concession to many users who expect that their login shell provides environment variables to the graphical environment, Aquamacs imports the environment from the login shell.

> So, I guess I would be surprised if my shell was tcsh (which is possible in Mac OS X), to find Aquamacs getting its environment variables from ~/.bash_profile. Just as I would be surprised when running emacs from any other Unix box.

Well, it is not getting them from any of the shell's init files directly.  It starts up the login shell, asks it for its environment and parses that.   I think we support bash and tcsh, as a minimum.

> I wonder what other Macintosh applications do?

They do not usually care about environment variables.  


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