Emacs as daemon

I have already posted about using Emacs as my default editor for Git commit messages and setting up Emacs quickly. But you can improve Emacs usage very well by using it as a daemon.

Running Emacs as a daemon can be done pretty simple by running emacs --daemon in your terminal. This loads all your Emacs configuration and starts an Emacs server in the background. To use this server there is a client command. emacsclient -t README.md will open the client, connect it to the server and opens the file README.md. The benefit is the fast start up of the client combined with tons of additional modes loaded in the background server.

You can simply use the above command to open the client as your default editor for Git. git config --global core.editor 'emacsclient -t' will set this for you. Running git commit will now open Emacs very fast. You can write down your commit message and save with C-x C-s. To leave the client use C-x #. To abort the commit leave the message blank and leave the client. That’s it.

Reducing characters to type in the terminal is always a good idea and since emacsclient -t is much longer then emacs you should define an alias for this.

alias e=emacsclient -t

Add the above line to your .zshrc or .bashrc file. This allows you to run e README.md to open the file README.md very fast in Emacs.