Start Emacs as a daemon

One of the great things about Emacs is that it can be daemonized. People always complain how their editors and IDEs turn so heavy that they can go take a nap while waiting for those to start up. Emacs, although being known as “the bloatfest” of editors, can manage the situation quite nicely by starting as a daemon:

emacs --daemon

It’s that simple. When you start Emacs as a daemon, it loads all your settings and plugins in the background and keeps them in memory. You will notice that if you start Emacs the normal way after you turned on a daemon, you will feel no difference. That’s because you don’t use emacs to connect to the daemon, you use emacsclient. Please issue a emacsclient --help in your terminal to see the available options.

Most of the time you will want to create a new window (or frame, whatever Emacs calls its stuff). By default, if you only provide a filename to emascclient, it will try to open it in an already existing frame. To open it in a new one, use emacsclient -c or emacsclient --create-frame.

Now, using emacsclient, you will notice that your files open instantly and all your settings are loaded correctly. If you use Emacs frequently I recommend starting the daemon when you boot into the system. Myself, I use a wrapper script that checks if there is any running daemon — if there is, connect to it, otherwise start one and then connect.

#!/bin/sh

ps aux | grep "[e]macs.*daemon" || emacs --daemon && emacsclient -c "$@" &

Another benefit of editing with a daemon is that your buffers stay open even if you close your window. I actually closed this by mistake while writing the previous paragraph but after a quick, whispered “fuck”, I remembered the whole thing is still in memory. Cool.