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Comment by jlhim | Hacker News Reader

this has got to be trolling. right? right?! i'm so confused.

Back when I first started my CompSci degree, a friend of mine always "quit" emacs with ctrl-z. Or, at least he did until he managed to fill his entire home directory quota with emacs backup files that were never cleaned up...

Ha, I still do that!

    $ jobs
    [4]   Stopped                 emacsclient -a '' -nw [redacted]  (wd: [redacted])
    [5]   Stopped                 emacsclient -a '' -nw [redacted]  (wd: [redacted])
    [6]   Stopped                 emacsclient -a '' -nw [redacted]  (wd: [redacted])
    [7]   Stopped                 emacsclient -a '' -nw [redacted]  (wd: [redacted])
    [8]   Stopped                 emacsclient -a '' -nw [redacted]  (wd: [redacted])
    [9]   Stopped                 emacsclient -a '' -nw [redacted]  (wd: [redacted])
    [10]   Stopped                 emacsclient -a '' -nw [redacted]  (wd: [redacted])
    [11]   Stopped                 emacsclient -a '' -nw [redacted]  (wd: [redacted])
    [12]-  Stopped                 emacsclient -a '' -nw [redacted]  (wd: [redacted])
    [13]+  Stopped                 emacsclient -a '' -nw [redacted]

But since they're all emacsclients it doesn't really matter.

`fg` is your friend

Don't you frequently deal with:

  /private/tmp/foo.txt locked by jnpatel@mac... (pid 14836): (s, q, p, ?)?

because of the lock files?

Nope, because emacsclient ends up opening them all in the same process (that's the beauty/entire point): Fork off an emacs in the background:

  emacs --daemon

Then run emacsclient to connect to it (open a new buffer in the daemon and switch to it):

  emacsclient -nw some_file

When you "quit" (with C-x C-c), it really just quits that client, but the main emacs is left running.

This has a number of benefits: 1) no locks like you mention, 2) access to all open buffers (even unsaved) from every emacsclient that's currently running (since they're really all just opening buffers in a single instance), 3) blazing startup speed (emacs is already running, you're just connecting to it and splatting a new buffer to the terminal).

I still remember how happy I was when I found out about that. On all servers I use (at home and at work), starting an emacs daemon is usually among the first things I do after rebooting.

Do you know about the "--no-wait" option for emacsclient?

Yes. But it doesn't play well with "-nw".

Ah yes, good point. In that case, the solution is `C-x #` to finish an emacsclient session without causing the server to quit.

Luckily C-x C-c also does that now.

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