open a file in an emacs buffer while in emacs terminal - bash

Suppose I am in terminal in Emacs (M-x term), and I list the following files in current directory:
text_code.R
Now I am in bash-3.2$ (terminal) and hope to open this .R file in another Emacs buffer and then edit. Is there a way to do it? This might be a trivial question, for I am a newbie to Linux and Emacs. Thanks in advance!

Remember that in Term Mode you can type C-c C-f to open a file (just like C-x C-f outside Term Mode). The prompt will already be on your current directory, so you just have to start typing the name of the file and autocomplete it with TAB.

I don't know the official procedure for what you want to do, but here is a procedure that works:
Either tell emacs to run as a daemon (Ref: EmacsAsDaemon) or in emacs start daemon via M-x server-start.
In the term, a command like emacsclient -n filename will start editing the specified file in the current window. Note, emacsclient also has a -c, --create-frame option to edit in a new frame. You probably will want to use a -n option as above, so you can continue using your term, after selecting it from the buffers list in another pane or frame.
If you start the daemon via M-x server-start in emacs, the daemon will terminate when you exit from emacs. If you set it up via reference mentioned above, use kill-emacs or save-buffers-kill-emacs commands or shell command emacsclient -e '(kill-emacs)' to stop it, as mentioned in part 6 of reference.

Related

How to start emacs from the terminal with an emacs command that runs soon after emacs is opened

Is there a way to launch Emacs from terminal and execute some Emacs command automatically soon after Emacs is launched (the command to be executed inside of emacs is provided along with the Emacs-launching command executed from the shell.)
What I want to do exactly is to have a command to launch Emacs and then open a new empty buffer and activate org mode inside of this buffer.
I want something that might look like this
emacs -fs --command="evil-buffer-new && org-mode"
I want the -fs flag because I want Emacs to open in full-screen in this case.
Update
--eval flag didn't work. Forget about evil-buffer-new, I have tried something as simple as:
emacs --eval="(org-mode)" txt.txt
txt.txt is an empty text file created before executing the above command (and please don't ask me why I didn't use .org file extension).
after Emacs opened, org-mode wasn't active. I had to run pp-eval-expression then (org-mode) to activate it, and then it worked.
Am I missing something here? How about rephrasing the question like this:
How to open an empty text file (having .txt file extension) with Emacs from the terminal and have org-mode activated in that buffer automatically?
See C-hig (emacs)Action Arguments or even just run emacs --help -- there are several options for loading and evaluating arbitrary code.
--command="evil-buffer-new && org-mode"
More like:
--eval="(progn (evil-buffer-new) (org-mode))"
But you'll have to figure it out for yourself, because I don't know what evil-buffer-new is specifically.
You told an empty file is created before emacs is started. But instead of an empty file could you create a file with file-local mode variable specifying the org mode ? For example with bash:
#!/bin/bash
cat <<EOF >> "$1"
; -*- mode: Org;-*-
EOF
emacs "$1" &
Now the mode is always resolved correctly with normal major mode selection procedure.

How to open a file in emacs from the terminal without a new instance of emacs opening?

Does anyone know why my terminal opens a new instance of emacs whenever I run emacs "filename" from my terminal?
My google results about the issue showed too many occurrences of people trying to do this liberately, but my emacs is doing this by default for some reason.
I've found no resolving cases in my init.el or ~/.zshrc
If emacs is already running, you can start a server (M-x start-server) from within emacs, and open files with emacsclient on the command line. You may create an alias for that.
Spacemacs has a dotspacemacs-enable-server setting in your init.el file (SPC f e d) to always enable the server.
This is a pretty normal default behavior for any program. If you have a cat process running in one terminal, and you run cat again in another, they're not going to somehow share: you get two copies of cat running. The same thing applies to emacs. There are configuration options to change this, basically by making the first instance of emacs act as a server. Then the second emacs still starts a new process, but instead of continuing to set up a brand new editor it just sends information to the server process.

Cannot open multiple files with Emacs on Mac

I can open a single file with Emacs, no problem. But I'm used to Emacs on Linux, where typing emacs test.cpp & would open a new Emacs frame, leaving the terminal free. On OS X, however, when I try to open a new frame with emacs test.cpp &, the terminal shows a process was created but the window fails to pop up. If I push Ctrl+C, the terminal shows "Stopped", but I see the process is still running because I can see it in the task monitor.
How to solve this problem? Thanks!
The issue here is that the command emacs on Linux is generally just the Emacs binary itself, which opens a new frame (that's Emacs-speak for X11 or other GUI window) unless you specify -nw on the command line; in contrast, the emacs command provided by Homebrew is a shell script that calls /usr/local/Cellar/emacs/24.3/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs -nw "$#" (substituting the version installed for 24.3). So the Homebrew version launches as a terminal app.
You can make a shell script that just runs /usr/local/Cellar/emacs/24.3/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs "$#", and it would behave somewhat as you expect, except that you would be launching a brand-new instance of the Mac app, which would cause an additional Emacs icon to appear on the Dock. Such a thing isn't considered "Mac-like," but it's not the end of the world.
An alternate solution, which is used a lot across different operating systems, is to make one Emacs process a server and then use emacsclient to open files from the command line. Emacsclient can open files in the current terminal, a new frame (GUI window), or an existing instance of Emacs. For an instance of Emacs to run as a server just requires that you run M-x server-start within it, or put (server-start) inside your init file (~/.emacs or ~/.emacs.d/init.el).
My Emacs config has this snippet, which starts server mode automatically when I launch the GUI app:
(when (display-graphic-p)
(server-start))
Then, once Emacs is running (you can make it autostart upon login in System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items), type emacsclient -nw test.cpp to open the file in the terminal, or emacsclient test.cpp & to open it in an existing frame, or emacsclient -c test.cpp & to open a new frame. (Note that if you open it in an existing frame, you use C-x # to close the buffer without closing the frame, as opposed to C-x C-c.)
Note that the terminal emacsclient command I gave just now didn't use & but the GUI ones did. & at the end of a command line puts the process in the background, meaning it's not monopolizing your terminal. For whatever reason (probably because it wouldn't be sensible to have a full-screen terminal app running in the background), when you invoke the terminal version of Emacs with &, it just suspends itself. The same thing would happen if you pressed C-z within Emacs. To get it back into the foreground, type fg (actually you can have multiple background processes, in which case fg would just pick the most recent one unless you specified a job specifier; see bash's man page (man bash) and search for JOB CONTROL if you're interested in the details).

Can I make emacsclient start alternate-editor in the background?

I have installed Emacs 24 on my Mac using homebrew, and similar to another question (listed below), I would like to use the same command when first starting Emacs as I do when opening additional files from the command line. To this end, I have set up an alias (modified a bit for readability):
EAPP=/usr/local/Cellar/emacs/24.3/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS
alias emacs='emacsclient -a $EAPP/Emacs -n'
Here's the twist: I put the -n (same as --no-wait) at the end because I like not having to hit C-x # to finish buffers. A side effect that I like is that it returns immediately to the command line.
Could there be a way to alter my alias to make the first-time run go in the background as well? Or should I just teach my fingers to put a & after every invocation of my emacs alias?
Question about making emacs and emacsclient seem the same:
Emacs - connect to daemon (if it exists) without using emacsclient

How do I open a file in Vim from inside a Conque shell

Often I find my self navigating the filesystem from a Conque shell in Vim and want to open a specific file inside my existing MacVim session. Is this possible ? - I was hoping for something like:
shell> open some/file.txt
and then have file.txt pop up inside my existing Vim window (preferably in a new tab).
Note: I am using #wycats vim dot files (not sure this matters).
Type from ConqueShell
mvim --remote-tab-silent filename
This will open the file in a new tab in MacVim
You could also write a Bash alias to shorten the command (assuming you are using bash).
Put in your ~/.profile
alias vim='mvim --remote-tab-silent'
this would enable you to type
vim filename
from ConqueShell or bash, and have it open in a new MacVim tab, rather than terminal vim. It of course does disable your ability to run standard vim (although you could still use the vi command), so maybe you would want to name the alias differently.
Just to add, this will work only if you placed the mvim executable on your path E.G. /usr/bin/mvim. It comes with the MacVim.app
Often I find my self navigating the filesystem from a Conque shell
The beauty of running a shell from inside vim is you have all of vim and the shell at your disposal.
gf is your friend. Once you get the file you want displayed on the screen in some way, you can enter normal mode, move the cursor to the file you want to edit, then use the gf command to navigate to the file. There are many ways to use this. Any program or command that outputs file names is great for this (ll, git status, etc). You could also type the filename into the shell, just to make it visible on the screen without actually running any terminal commands (tab completion is handy here).
It is possible, you can start vim as server and then add as many files as you want, but I'm not very familiar with this, so I can't give you just a direction.

Resources