How can I make emacsclient just open a window for an existing emacs daemon without opening a new file

emacs emacsclient
Mike Crowe picture Mike Crowe · Jul 13, 2010 · Viewed 7.1k times · Source

I use an emacs daemon to preserve my emacs session even if I have to reboot the machine that I run my X server on or if I want to access the same session from a different machine. This works very well but when restoring a session I'd quite like to just run "emacsclient --create-frame --no-wait" to connect to the daemon without opening a new file. It won't let me get away without specifying a filename.

I've tried using --eval to execute a function rather than open a file but the window just goes away when the evaluation is complete.

(Emacs 23.1 via backports on Debian GNU/Linux 5.0.)

Answer

bnbeckwith picture bnbeckwith · Jul 13, 2010

From the help provided by emacsclient, you have a few options. First, is the one mentioned already which is emacsclient -c. That will try to create a frame associated with the emacs daemon. The advantage to this is that if DISPLAY is not set, then it will open emacs in the terminal.

Which brings us to the next best option (especially if you are logging in remotely): emacsclient -t which forces emacs to open up in terminal mode even if DISPLAY is set.

Also keep in mind that you can set the display from the command-line as well. I use this often when logging in remotely from VNC. The full command would be emacsclient -d DISPLAY -c

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