Help: Why does Terminal always start up Emacs for me?!

[angharad]

For the other user on the system, Terminal starts up just a shell. For me, though, it always fires off Emacs. I'm pretty sure that when I started using Emacs on the new install a few weeks ago that I didn't tell it to. I like Emacs and all, but sometimes I just want a plain shell

Comments

[twinbee]

its because you're using a Mac

[angharad]

Yeah right; thanks a lot! (; How do you explain the different behaviour for the other user, then, smart guy?

[twinbee]

Macs aren't supposed to be used by a second person. In fact, macs aren't meant to be used by anyone.

[twinbee]

of course, it is possible to gain karma points by installing gentoo. then everything should work right, after you've spent six days compiling from sources

[blarglefiend]

You want to look at the preferences file for Terminal: ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist. At some point that stopped being straight text XML and became some weirdarse binary format, but you can still edit it with the Property List Editor.

Basically, what probably happened is that you had an emacs session running, tweaked the display or keyboard settings, and clicked "Use Settings as Defaults". Terminal, being a bonehead, included the currently-running command in the list of things to add to the default, so now the default action on opening a new window is to run emacs.

[angharad]

Ah, thanks so much! Indeed, that fixed it!