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Comment by theophrastus | Hacker News Reader

If you have any details, links, hints about how to accomplish this (for instance, where does one find a proper "emacsclient.service" file?) please consider yourself emboldened

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Starting from systemd is a league beyond what I've done. But you might like this script:

    #!/bin/sh
    emacsclient -t $@ || (emacs --daemon && emacsclient -t $@)

You'll want something like

    (unless (server-running-p)
      (server-start))

in your init file.

Or use

    emacsclient -t --alternative-editor=""

and emacsclient will start the daemon if it hasn't already been started. You can also set the ALTERNATIVE_EDITOR environment variable to "" to achieve the same effect.

After some investigation I found that the option and the env var are called "alternate editor" and not "alternative editor".

Sorry, brainfart!

I use the system service (emacs@.service) from [this blog post][0]. I used 'systemctl enable emacs@myusername.service' so that emacs is always started on boot.

I have a one-liner shell script called 'em' that just runs 'emacsclient -t $*' so that it can be set as $VISUAL and used by whatever command line tools use that.

[0]: http://blog.refu.co/?p=1296

I don't have a systemd example, but here's a GNU dmd service that I use which shows how to properly start/stop the daemon:

https://git.dthompson.us/dotfiles.git/blob/HEAD:/dotfiles/.d...

I had a slightly different approach in that I made a script to launch Emacs server on-demand: https://github.com/qiushihe/dotpiles/blob/master/emacs/emacs...

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