Set emacs to always run in background

Question

In my bash terminal I have emacs set to run in XWindows. I prefer this to not freeze my terminal session so I run:

emacs filename &

Is there anyway to alias this? I have tried:

xemacs='emacs $1 &'

with no luck.

Answer 1

You can create a script to do that for you:

#!/bin/sh
emacs "$@" &

Answer 2

Assuming you're using bash...you can create a shell function by adding this to your .bashrc:

emacs () {
  /usr/bin/emacs "$@" &
}

It accomplishes the same thing as a wrapper, but without the extra wrapper.