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.
I'm no emacs expert, but this did the trick for me:
emacs -nw
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.
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.
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
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).
