How to open Emacs inside Bash

Question

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?

As always when I see a such question, I wonder why you would want to do that. With a graphical emacs you could use every fonts you want, nice colorscheme, use the image support, etc … — Daimrod, Jan 05 '12 at 19:40
@Daimrod: sometimes a new window popping up harrasses the concentrated mind. Sometimes you want to do a quick one in an existing window and sometimes you want to reserve a whole room for your thing. — mike3996, Jan 05 '12 at 22:24
@Daimrod because sometimes you're editing files across two ssh hops on a slow link and the X version of emacs is too much for your connection. — Trebor Rude, Mar 05 '15 at 22:07
Also, one might want to practice using Emacs in terminal mode. — cammil, Oct 30 '16 at 09:50
@Daimrod it's also useful for pairing across a service like tmate — Paul Byrne, May 11 '19 at 05:45
I keep a session log of every terminal session I run so that I leave an audit trail for myself. When emacs launches in a separate window, everything goes out-of-band. When I run emacs within the terminal, I'm more able to discern when I left it and what I did. — Tom Stambaugh, Oct 05 '21 at 14:26
If I want to use a graphical editor or IDE, I'll do so. I use emacs when I want to edit plain text with NO magic. — Tom Stambaugh, Oct 05 '21 at 14:28

score 250 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 11 '20 at 14:24

250

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.

edited Nov 11 '20 at 14:24

Peter Mortensen

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answered Jan 05 '12 at 16:44

Jeff Foster

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score 53 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 05 '12 at 16:45

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Just type emacs -nw. This won't open an X window.

answered Jan 05 '12 at 16:45

topskip

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score 34 · Answer 3 · edited Nov 11 '20 at 14:26

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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 :).

edited Nov 11 '20 at 14:26

Peter Mortensen

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answered Jul 10 '14 at 18:10

user2820579

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score 14 · Answer 4 · edited Nov 11 '20 at 14:24

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If you need to open Emacs without X:

emacs -nw

edited Nov 11 '20 at 14:24

Peter Mortensen

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answered Jan 05 '12 at 16:45

speeves

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In the future, note that you need a newline for the code formatting to work properly. It got me the first couple times I used it too :) – Tikhon Jelvis Jan 05 '12 at 22:19
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Thanks, Tikhon! That's been pissing me off all day :P – speeves Jan 05 '12 at 23:27

score 5 · Answer 5 · edited Nov 11 '20 at 14:28

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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

edited Nov 11 '20 at 14:28

Peter Mortensen

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answered Dec 30 '17 at 05:23

Eric Ihli

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You could also just use a 1-line shell script, in your PATH – jrw32982 Mar 23 '21 at 17:35

score 2 · Answer 6 · edited Nov 11 '20 at 14:27

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emacs hello.c -nw

This is to open a hello.c file using Emacs inside the terminal.

edited Nov 11 '20 at 14:27

Peter Mortensen

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answered Jul 01 '17 at 06:46

muhe

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This answer was already provided by the accepted answer two years prior. – dotancohen Oct 17 '21 at 09:21

score 1 · Answer 7 · answered Dec 06 '16 at 20:44

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It can be useful also to add the option --no-desktop to avoid launching several buffers saved.

answered Dec 06 '16 at 20:44

adolflow

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score 1 · Answer 8 · edited Nov 11 '20 at 14:30

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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.

edited Nov 11 '20 at 14:30

Peter Mortensen

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answered May 01 '18 at 00:11

user2497

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How to open Emacs inside Bash

8 Answers8