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I am looking to switch to Emacs from Vim and one thing that is keeping me away is that Emacs opens up a separate window of its own when run under X. Can I get the same behavior for Emacs as Vim does when not run under X?

That is, I want Emacs to start the session in the same terminal as the one in which its fired.

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5 Answers 5

Reset to default
37

I'm no emacs expert, but this did the trick for me:

emacs -nw
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  • 8
    You're right, for the curious -nw is short for --no-window-system which tells emacs not to use its X interface.
    – Mic
    Dec 3, 2009 at 10:46
  • @Mic: Thanks for the explanation, this way I'll remember what it stands for
    – Alberto Zaccagni
    Dec 3, 2009 at 10:47
  • Also, package emacs-nox, present in all common distributions, when installed instead of default emacs-gtk, contains Emacs build without X11 support.
    – dess
    Mar 14, 2021 at 6:25
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You might prefer starting emacs as emacs --daemon and then using emacsclient -t to edit files. This keeps Emacs loaded in the background, so that you can use Emacs more like vi. Editing sessions will start up instantly, and "quitting" via C-x C-c will just close the current connection. It is very nice.

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Although your question has been answered, I would venture to say that this is not the way any regular user would use emacs. Unlike vim, emacs generally has a longer startup time and anyway tends to be running all the time with multiple open buffers. So when you want to do something with emacs in a terminal, you invoke emacsclient -nw (assuming an emacs serverhas been started). Look at How to start to use EmacsClient for details.

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3

Combining the above answers by Dick Kenny and Alberto Zaccagni you get the following configuration which I use in .bashrc:

alias emacs='emacsclient -nw -c -a ""'

This will try to connect to a runnning emacs daemon. If none is running, it will startup a new one, and then connect using the current terminal window.

From the docs:

-a EDITOR, --alternate-editor=EDITOR
        Editor to fallback to if the server is not running
        If EDITOR is the empty string, start Emacs in daemon
        mode and try connecting again

-nw, -t, --tty      Open a new Emacs frame on the current terminal

-c, --create-frame  Create a new frame instead of trying to 
                    use the current Emacs frame
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    When I try this command, Emacs fails to start, instead giving me a warning about there not being a server to connect to, followed by a giant dump of values and Emacs not starting.
    – Koz Ross
    Apr 7, 2016 at 10:23
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If you use bash, you can always add the following to your .bashrc

alias emacs="emacs -nw"

That's saved me a lot of typing (and cursing when I forget to type the switches).

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