emacs and systemd View article history Edit article

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Talks about: emacs, and systemd

I like to use emacs to edit files in a terminal. It tends to start a little slow, therefore I’ve created a systemd unit to automatically start the emacs daemon and use aliases to connect to the running daemon. The unit looks like this:

[Unit]
Description=Emacs text editor [%I]
Documentation=info:emacs man:emacs(1) https://gnu.org/software/emacs/

[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/usr/bin/emacs --daemon=%i
ExecStop=/usr/bin/emacsclient --eval "(kill-emacs)"
Environment=SSH_AUTH_SOCK=%t/keyring/ssh
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Enable it with systemctl --user enable emacs@user and define any number of aliases to make connecting to the emacs daemon easier:

alias e='emacsclient --tty --socket-name=user'
alias vim='emacsclient --tty --socket-name=user'
alias vi='emacsclient --tty --socket-name=user'
alias nano='emacsclient --tty --socket-name=user'
alias ed='emacsclient --tty --socket-name=user'