How to open Emacs inside Bash
BashEmacsBash Problem Overview
I'm using Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot). When I type the command "emacs" in the terminal, it opens Emacs as a separate window. How can I open it inside the terminal, like the nano editor?
Bash Solutions
Solution 1 - Bash
Emacs takes many launch options. The one that you are looking for is
emacs -nw. This will open Emacs inside the terminal disregarding the DISPLAY environment variable even if it is set.
The long form of this flag is emacs --no-window-system.
More information about Emacs launch options can be found in the manual.
Solution 2 - Bash
Just type emacs -nw. This won't open an X window.
Solution 3 - Bash
In the spirit of providing functionality, go to your .profile or .bashrc file located at /home/usr/ and at the bottom add the line:
alias enw='emacs -nw'
Now each time you open a terminal session you just type, for example, enw and you have the Emacs no-window option with three letters :).
Solution 4 - Bash
If you need to open Emacs without X:
emacs -nw
Solution 5 - Bash
I didn't like the alias solution for my purposes. For one, it didn't work for setting export EDITOR="emacs -nw".
But you can pass --without-x to configure and then just the regular old Emacs will always open in terminal.
curl http://gnu.mirrors.hoobly.com/emacs/emacs-25.3.tar.xz
tar -xvzf emacs-25.3.tar.xz && cd emacs-25.3
./configure --without-x
make && sudo make install
Solution 6 - Bash
emacs hello.c -nw
This is to open a hello.c file using Emacs inside the terminal.
Solution 7 - Bash
It can be useful also to add the option --no-desktop to avoid launching several buffers saved.
Solution 8 - Bash
Try emacs —daemon to have Emacs running in the background, and emacsclient to connect to the Emacs server.
It’s not much time overhead saved on modern systems, but it’s a lot better than running several instances of Emacs.