28 September 2008

Emacs: now with built-in daemon

Emacs CVS has an interesting new feature: it now accepts a --daemon command line option which makes it start up as a Unix daemon; it detaches from the controlling terminal, starts up a new process session, goes to the background, starts an Emacs server and just waits for connections. The user can then use emacsclient to create new frames (console or graphical) for the background Emacs, using the new multi-tty abilities of Emacs 23. Since frame creation is virtually instantaneous, this makes the editor start up much faster than in the usual case (and a lot more so if you have an extensive configuration). Also, if your X session goes down, the editor is still running in the background with your buffers and applications, safe from harm. Very neat! (Get it from the usual place if you run Debian.)

(Note: this new --daemon mode is a cleaner replacement for the old screen-based preload-emacs script that was distributed with the multi-tty branch.)

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Like nedit and cygnused have done for years. Except they do it for EXTRA speed, not to make up for the slowness of bloat.

paurullan said...

Thanks for the tip!

M. Grégoire said...

Is this available yet for the emacs-snapshot package from orebokech?

Romain Francoise said...

It is starting with 20080928-1.

M. Grégoire said...

Oh I see. I had the etch version in my sources.list. Thanks for your work putting together the debs.

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