How to run 'emacs' in the terminal emulator without a separate window?

Question

I am looking to switch to Emacs from Vim and one thing that is keeping me away is that Emacs opens up a separate window of its own when run under X. Can I get the same behavior for Emacs as it does when not run under X? That is, I want Emacs to start the session in the same terminal as the one in which its fired.

Let me know if the question is not clear. Thank in advance!

Answer 1

I'm no emacs expert, but this did the trick for me:

emacs -nw

Answer 2

You might prefer starting emacs as emacs --daemon and then using emacsclient -t to edit files. This keeps Emacs loaded in the background, so that you can use Emacs more like vi. Editing sessions will start up instantly, and "quitting" via C-x C-c will just close the current connection. It is very nice.

Answer 3

Although your question has been answered, I would venture to say that this is not the way any regular user would use emacs. Unlike vim, emacs generally has a longer startup time and anyway tends to be running all the time with multiple open buffers. So when you want to do something with emacs in a terminal, you invoke emacsclient -nw (assuming an emacs serverhas been started). Look at How to start to use EmacsClient for details.

Answer 4

If you use bash, you can always add the following to your .bashrc

alias emacs="emacs -nw"

That's saved me a lot of typing (and cursing when I forget to type the switches).

Answer 5

Combining the above answers by Dick Kenny and Alberto Zaccagni you get the following configuration which I use in .bashrc:

alias emacs='emacsclient -nw -c -a ""'

This will try to connect to a runnning emacs daemon. If none is running, it will startup a new one, and then connect using the current terminal window.

From the docs:

-a EDITOR, --alternate-editor=EDITOR
        Editor to fallback to if the server is not running
        If EDITOR is the empty string, start Emacs in daemon
        mode and try connecting again

-nw, -t, --tty      Open a new Emacs frame on the current terminal

-c, --create-frame  Create a new frame instead of trying to 
                    use the current Emacs frame