Faster GNU Emacs start: The Emacs Daemon

Did you know Emacs can be ran in daemon mode?

$ emacs --daemon # Starts emacs, forks into background $ emacsclient -c # Connect to the daemon, '-c' to create new frame 

Or that this daemon can be auto-started if not running by specifying an empty string as an alternate editor?

$ emacsclient -a "" -c 

(And in case you didn't know it, you can run Emacs in the terminal too, with the -nw option.)

$ alias edit='emacsclient -a "" -nw -c' $ edit [file...] 

What this here does is it disconnects the big part of Emacs, the large lisp environment and configuration and buffer-handling and such, from the part of actually drawing the window and grabbing the editor when you need it. When you want to start editing a file, it's snap and ready; no crawling the disk and parsing elisp configuration files. Under the terminal particularly, it's an instant startup compared to how Emacs normally runs, and it really changes the perception of how heavy the editor seems.

The memory usage of opening up half a dozen clients and editing half a dozen files is the same as running a single emacs and editing as many files -- each client is only 1.5 megabytes of RAM usage, and the daemon itself caps out at 170 megabytes for my own workload, editing up to about a dozen C sources for a few projects every week.

At any time, you can close the daemon by opening a client and running M-x kill-emacs.

The one thing to watch out for is that, since your distro probably configures Emacs to use the GTK for running under X, that the daemon will crash when you close X. It won't mess up any of your files, and it's not going to be a problem for all but one or two of you, but it does happen.

Here's an emacsclient.desktop file that you can create in .local/share/applications in order to use it with your desktop environment, an edited version of the emacs.desktop on my system:

[Desktop Entry] Name=Emacsclient GenericName=Text Editor Comment=Edit text MimeType=text/english;text/plain;text/x-makefile;text/x-c++hdr;text/x-c++src;text/x-chdr;text/x-csrc;text/x-java;text/x-moc;text/x-pascal;text/x-tcl;text/x-tex;application/x-shellscript;text/x-c;text/x-c++; Exec=emacsclient -a "" -c %F Icon=emacs Type=Application Terminal=false Categories=Development;TextEditor; StartupWMClass=Emacs Keywords=Text;Editor; 

For me, this works fantastically well because unlike a number of others, I don't run Emacs as an IDE, but rather as just a text editor. I'll open a new editor window to read or write in every five to fifteen minutes, I let dwm do the part of tiling them out and swapping between them, and I'll leave half a dozen clients running in the background so I can pick up on them exactly where I left off. I get my themes, a shortcut set I like, my macros, and online I can get the syntax highlighting for just about every language from NASM x86 to Forth to Donald Knuth's MMIX.

I hope this helps!