Emacsclient on Ubuntu
August 10, 2016
Over the past few days I have been using emacsclient to open files
in an already running emacs in daemon (server) mode. Despite having
been using Emacs for years I never got around to trying this out for a
few days. And I really like it. So today I decided to switch my
workflow to using emacsclient the easy way.
First, I added the following lines to my ~/.emacs.d/init.el:
(server-start)
;; Filename or buffer name in frame title
;; http://emacs-fu.blogspot.com/2011/01/setting-frame-title.html
(setq frame-title-format
'((:eval (if (buffer-file-name)
(abbreviate-file-name (buffer-file-name))
"%b"))))
(set-face-attribute 'default t :font "Monospace-9")
Note the additional code to set the frame-title-format. Without this
I ended up with --create-frame in the title bar of the
frame. Somehow the version of Emacs I use considers this switch (see
below) the invocation-name.
Originally, I used an alias, gemacs, which called emacs with the
font I desired. But since emacsclient has no --font option I
(finally) added this to my init.el as well; as shown above.
Next, I added the following lines to the end of my ~/.bashrc:
# Emacs
export ALTERNATE_EDITOR=emacs EDITOR=emacsclient VISUAL=emacsclient
If emacs is not running, and hence emacsclient can't connect to it,
the alternate editor is tried. The emacsclient program does have a
--alternate-editor option, but when I tried this I got a backtrace
which ended with:
...
Error: server did not start correctly
Error: Could not start the Emacs daemon
Finally, I added the following to my ~/.bash_functions so I can
always use emacs to either start a daemon or connect to it via
emacsclient:
function emacs {
emacsclient --create-frame $* >/dev/null 2>&1
}
Note the redirect of both stderr and stdout to /dev/null. This
prevents Gtk warnings, like given below, from flooding the terminal:
(--create-frame:19621): Gtk-WARNING **: Attempting to add a widget with type Gtk
Box to a GtkMenuItem, but as a GtkBin subclass a GtkMenuItem can only contain on
e widget at a time; it already contains a widget of type GtkAccelLabel
Don't forget to use C-x # when done with editing a buffer, not C-x C-c.