Emacs as a service

Prerequisites
Setting up a systemd service-unit
Setting up your environment
Afterword

After I have been asked to explain a bit about how I set up my emacs in response to a post I made in the elixirforum I do it now.

Prerequisites

You are using systemd.
You are using emacs.

Setting up a `systemd` service-unit

The following snippet has to be saved in ${HOME}/.config/systemd/user/emacs.service.

[Unit]
Description=Emacs: the extensible, self-documenting text editor

[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/usr/bin/emacs --daemon
ExecStop=/usr/bin/emacsclient --eval "(kill-emacs)"
Environment=SSH_AUTH_SOCK=%t/keyring/ssh
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

After it is saved, you can enable the service via systemctl --user enable emacs.service, the emacs daemon process will from then on be started when you log in to your system and be shut down when you log of.

Next thing to do is to also start it for the current session, such that you can use it right away. This is done via systemctl --user start emacs.service

If you change your emacs configuration you have to systemctl --user restart emacs.service.

If your deamon does not properly start, you probably need to add (server-start) to your .emacs-file.

Setting up your environment

Open up your shells RC file and add the equivalent of the following snippet (which itself is from a .zshrc but should be valid bash syntax as well).

alias emax="emacsclient -c" # open file in a *new* X-Window
alias emat="emacsclient -t" # open file in the current terminal
export VISUAL="emacsclient -c"
export EDITOR="emacsclient -t"

Thats it.

From now on do not use emacs or emacs -nw anymore, but the aliases from above. Of course, if you had aliases before that you are more familiar with, feel free to edit them accordingly to use emacsclient now.

Afterword

Without systemd?

Before I switched to arch-linux I used funtoo linux which did not use systemd but openrc. Openrc did not have something equivalent to systemds usermode. As a replacement I started emacs in deamon mode on login from within my windowmanager.

How this has to be done depends on the windowmanager you use. Also this of course does not work for SSH-logins.

And even though I do not have problems anymore yet, I'd like to learn about solutions that work without systemd and without beeing able to use sudo (so a system service does not count).

From windowmanagers

I've heard that many windowmanagers have something similar to Windows startmenu and manage it through desktop-files.

For those you'll need to find your emacs desktop file and change it to use emacsclient -c to actually benefit of it from outside of your terminal.

I do not use a windowmanager that has such a menu, but I start all my applications through rofi and the emacsclient entries are rather prominent in the list of recent applications.