multi-tty emacs

I'm a huge fan of multi-tty emacs. It allows you to run terminal based emacsclients, kind of like how XEmacs does. For years I used XEmacs because it had this feature, but last year I heard about the multi-tty project, and it was so nice to switch back into Emacs from XEmacs.

I have a great setup now where I have long running Emacs servers, one per project that I'm working on, which are mostly Ruby on Rails projects. Each of these servers runs for a long time in the background, so I can setup all the terminals and shells that I need, and get things organized just how I like them. Then, I can connect to these Emacs servers with a text based emacsclient.

I start my Emacs servers with screen, this allows me to disconnect the Emacs server from the tty, so that I can logoff of a machine and still leave the Emacs server running. This is fantastic for web development work, because I can have these Emacs servers running on my web servers, all across the planet, connect to them when I need to do work, and have everything setup just like I like it.

I found the following script somewhere on the net, and it works great for starting up the Emacs server with screen:

#!/bin/bash
# Usage: preload-emacs <name> [<waitp>]
#
# Preloads the Emacs instance called NAME in a detached screen
# session.  Does nothing if the instance is already running.  If WAITP
# is non-empty, the function waits until the server starts up and
# creates its socket; otherwise it returns immediately.

name="$1"
waitp="$2"
screendir="/var/run/screen/S-$USER"
serverdir="/tmp/emacs$UID"
emacs=/usr/sness/emacs/bin/emacs

if [ -z "$name" ]; then
    echo "Usage: preload_emacs <name> [<waitp>]" <&2
    exit 1
fi

if [ ! -e "$screendir"/*."$name" ]; then
    if [ -e "$serverdir/$name" ]; then
    # Delete leftover socket (for the wait option)
    rm "$serverdir/$name"
    fi
    screen -dmS "$name" "$emacs" -nw --eval "(setq server-name \"$name\")" -f server-start
fi
if [ ! -z "$waitp" ]; then
    while [ ! -e "$serverdir/$name" ]; do sleep 0.1; done
fi

I have this aliased to the letter "e":

alias e='/home/sness/bin/preload-emacs sness'

o when I want to start up a server I can just type "e snessnet" to start an Emacs server with a name of "snessnet". Mmmm, less keystrokes...

To connect to these Emacs servers, I use emacsclient, and alias it to "ec":

alias ec='/usr/sness/emacs/bin/emacsclient -s sness'

So that I can type "ec snessnet" to connect to the snessnet Emacs server.


I have a whole bunch of these Emacs servers running at once on my development box, right now I have 9 different Emacs servers running, each of them for a different project that I'm working on. To look at all the current servers that are running, I have an alias setup:

we='ps auwwx | grep emacs | grep SCREEN | cut -d "\"" -f 2'

Which allows me to just type "we" to find out the names of all the currently running Emacs servers. Really really sweet.

What is extra sweet is that multi-tty emacs is in the process of getting merged into the main Emacs codebase, so that by the time Emacs 23 is out, it should be in the mainline codebase.