Emacs has the wonderful emacsclient for quickly editing files in Emacs from external tools, e.g. the shell. I am using the following alias to edit a file using emacsclient:
alias ec='emacsclient -n'
However, then Emacs’s window does not get raised, nor activated. There is also a bug in Emacs’ raise-frame function, which hinders any efforts. The best solution so far for this is described here, which uses wmctrl to activate and raise Emacs. My Emacs runs on Desktop 1, so I use wmctrl also to first switch to my Emacs desktop. You could probably make a more elaborate function which first finds the desktop that Emacs is running on, but this is good enough for me. So here is the slightly adjusted code snippet from the above link:
;;
;; Start emacs server
;;
(server-start)
(defadvice raise-frame (after make-it-work (&optional frame) activate)
"Work around some bug? in raise-frame/Emacs/GTK/Metacity/something.
Katsumi Yamaoka posted this in
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel:39702"
(call-process
"wmctrl" nil nil nil "-s" "1")
(call-process
"wmctrl" nil nil nil "-i" "-R"
(frame-parameter (or frame (selected-frame)) 'outer-window-id)))
(add-hook 'server-switch-hook 'raise-frame)