I finally got around to upgrading to the the newest stable release of Emacs. There were a few things I wanted to be able to do and rather than use outdated methods I decided it was time to upgrade to Emacs 23. I ran into a few hitches along the way but after getting them resolved I went about setting up the Emacs daemon to load quietly in the background and start using multiple emacs clients under different GNU Screen windows. I had a bit of a time figuring out how to make it so it wouldn’t try to start up another server each time I logged in via SSH or created a new Screen. I never really found a one stop answer for this, rather it was a combination of several suggestions I saw. So here’s what I came up with for my ~/.bashrc:

# Boot up the Emacs Daemon                                                                                                                                                                                 
function emacs_is_running() {                                                                                                                                                                              
    ps -ef | grep "emacs --daemon" | grep -v grep > /dev/null                                                                                                                                              
}                                                                                                                                                                                                          

# Debug                                                                                                                                                                                                           
if emacs_is_running; then                                                                                                                                                                                  
    echo Emacs daemon already running                                                                                                                                                                      
else                                                                                                                                                                                                       
    echo Launching emacs daemon                                                                                                                                                                            
    emacs --daemon                                                                                                                                                                                         
fi                                                                                                                                                                                                         
                                                                                                                                                                                                           
                                                                                                                                                                                                          
# Fix Typos, Add Shortcuts...                                                                                                                                                                                               
alias e="emacsclient -c -a nano"                                                                                                                                                                           
alias emac="emacsclient -c -a nano"                                                                                                                                                                           
alias emacs="emacsclient -c -a nano"                                                                                                                                                                       
alias emasc="emacsclient -c -a nano"        
alias pico="emacsclient -c"                                                                                                                                                                               
EDITOR="emacsclient -c -a nano"                                                                                                                                                                            
VISUAL="emacsclient -c -a nano"                                                                                                                                                                            

Brad Fettes

A seasoned Senior Solutions Architect with 20 years of experience in technology design and implementation. Renowned for innovative solutions and strategic insights, he excels in driving complex projects to success. Outside work, he is a passionate fisherman and fish keeper, specializing in planted tanks.