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Comment by jdreaver | Hacker News Reader

The best way to run emacs IMO is to use "emacs --daemon" to spawn a single daemon process, and then connect to it using emacsclient. Then, startup time is instant!

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then you have to maintain/monitor that daemon, seems like too much work.

If only someone made something that could monitor daemons and make sure they stay running...

then you have maintain that thing that monitors the daemons.

If your system is using systemd, you can create a service file that does that under --user. I manage some user daemons that way.

I use the GNU Shepherd init system as an unprivileged user to manage my emacs daemon, and other things like gpg-agent.

The real benefit of 'emacs --daemon', for me, isn't the faster client startup time, but the unification of the many programs that may spawn $EDITOR. Rather than each one spawning a new Emacs process, these programs spawn a client in the window I already have open where I can access everything else I was working on. On top of that, I use the ItsAllText extension for Firefox to edit text fields inside of that same Emacs instance, too. Very convenient.

What? You literally just call emacs --daemon on startup. You can also easily kill it and restart it.

The first line of my ~/.emacs is (start-server). /usr/bin/emacs is launched once and runs forever. I spend nearly all my time in emacs, so there is nothing to maintain/monitor. If emacs dies, it is rather obvious.

I meant (server-start). Doh!

Personally I just always start emacs with `emacsclient -c -a=`. If no emacs daemon is running, it starts a new one and connects to it.

> then you have to maintain/monitor that daemon, seems like too much work.

This thread over at reddit may kill your concerns :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/45mtdz/can_someone_e...

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