Using Emacs - 22 - emacsclient

Another quick hit today.

This video is really setting the stage for hte next two, where I talk about org-mode capturing.

Today, we're demoing the use of the emacs server and client.

Back in the old days, emacs took a LOOONG time to load. A complex conviguration could take on the order of 10 to 20 seconds. This resulted in people loading emacs at the start of the day and leaving it up forever. While load times aren't much of an issue anymore, it's still nice to leave emacs around all the time.

That's where running emacs as a server comes in.. I set up a keyboard shortcut my window manager to run:

emacsclient -a "" -c

Rather than trying to run emacs, this tries to connect to an already running emacs server. The -c creates a new frame. Instead if you use -t it will open emacs in the terminal. The -a "" tells emacs to run itself as a server (daemon) if it isn't already running.

Later on, running emacsclient -c will very quickly bring up a new frame to the server.

In addition to instant loading, Running emacs this way has the advantage, or some may say disadvantage of keeping buffers around forever since you just keep emacs up and running.

Relevant links:

• Video series overview page:
  • http://cestlaz.github.io/stories/emacs
• Code:
  • https://github.com/zamansky/using-emacs/tree/master