Emacs as a default system editor

Many novice Emacs users often complain about Emacs being slow to start. This makes them use alternative editors like vi or nano for quick edits. Emacs is indeed a slow beast to power up, but the following solution will show you that it's not much of an issue even if you want to make some quick changes in a single file.

Emacs daemon

If we can't reduce the Emacs start up time what could we possibly do? We can start it less often — ideally only once when OS boots. That is the basic idea behind running Emacs as a daemon. To do it execute the following:

emacs --daemon &!

This will start Emacs in daemon mode and untie it from the parent shell. You will see some debug info being printed into the console and eventually stop. That's all, no windows popping out yet.

Now, let's make a client for that server:

emacsclient -c

An ordinary Emacs window will appear. You can run this command many times, each time a different window will be spawned (just like after executing new-frame. This is how you create a terminal-only client:

emacsclient -nw

emacsclient can be executed with a file argument, which will open that file in the existing Emacs client (if no other arguments were provided) or in a new frame (if called with -c).

Script to use as your $EDITOR

I wrote this script for the sake of quick file editing, especially when I'm working in my terminal.

#!/bin/sh
FILE="`readlink -f \"$1\"`"
[ -e "$FILE" ] || touch "$FILE"
PERMISSIONS=`stat "$FILE" --format "%U"`

if [ $PERMISSIONS == $USER ]; then
    emacsclient -n "$FILE"
else
    emacsclient -n /sudo::"$FILE"
fi

This script is just enough for doing occasional edits. It handles root-owned files as well using Tramp. Also I added -n flag which makes emacsclient immediately return after running, so my shell is not hung until I close the file in Emacs.

That's it. Using the combination of Emacs daemon mode and the provided script you can forget about spawning other editors and cringing from their unfamiliar bindings.

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