(For those not so familar with Emacs vs Vi, let’s just say this is like the social situation between Republicans and the Democrats or the Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists: You live next door to them, but you know they’re going to hell.)

Emacs can run in the background as a daemon, so it starts lickety-split when you need to spawn an editor. But what if it’s not running yet? I needed a convoluted method for the Emacs 23.0.60 I was running in Ubuntu Intrepid; the Emacs 23.1.1 in Ubuntu Karmic’s emacs23 package includes an improved emacsclient that’ll launch an emacs daemon for you if you pass it an empty string for the alternative editor (-a parameter).

That’s why this goes in /usr/local/bin/editor:

#!/bin/sh
exec emacsclient -c -a "" “$@”

You’re going to want to use this as your editor alternative and use that as your EDITOR environment variable, but there’s a problem — now if you

sudo visudo, you’re launching emacs and you’re left with an emacs daemon running as root. Oops.

So you

sudo visudo

and add

!env_editor,editor=/usr/bin/zile to the end of your

Defaults line.

Now:

sudo update-alternatives —install /usr/bin/editor editor /usr/local/bin/editor 99
cat >> ~/.bashrc
export EDITOR=“/usr/bin/editor”
export VISUAL=“/usr/bin/editor”
export SUDO_EDITOR=“/usr/bin/zile”

You’ll want to be able to kill the emacs daemon, so this goes in /usr/local/bin/killemacs

#!/bin/bash
emacsclient -e “(progn (setq kill-emacs-hook ’nil) (kill-emacs))” && rm -rf “/tmp/emacs`id -u`”

And you’ll want to automatically kill them on shutdown, so here’s /etc/init.d/killemacsdaemons:

#!/bin/sh
exec find /tmp -maxdepth 1 -type d -name ‘emacs*’ -exec find {} -type s -name server \;|perl -ne ‘s/[^\d]//g; print scalar getpwuid($_), "\
"’|xargs -n 1 su -c /usr/local/bin/killemacs -

Then:

sudo update-rc.d killemacsdaemons stop 1 0 1 6 .