Playing with multi-tty Emacs
I’ve installed a new version of GNU Emacs on my Debian
system. The cool thing about this version is that is has supprot for
multi-tty which means that it can show frames om multiple different
kinds of TTYs.
Normally you can start your Emacs in X and use emacsclient to
quickly bring up a new frame. This works fine — but in fact it’s a
little too much, for you always get a new frame (in the X environment)
when using emacsclient. If you are logged in using something like
SSH, then what you really want is to have emacsclient show a frame
on your terminal.
This is exactly what the Emacs multi-tty support project gives
you! Starting emacsclient with the $DISPLAY variable set gives you
a new frame in X, as you would expect. But if this variable is unset
(as it is in a SSH session without X forwarding) then you get your new
frame in the console. You then of course have access to Emacs just as
you left it, including all the buffers.
So I can now just leave my Emacs running at my computer, and to check mail I just SSH to my box and connect to the running Emacs process. There I just switch to my Gnus buffer instead of having to kill it first. Very sweet!
Oh, and by the way: the author says that emacsclient starts up
faster than vi… In fact, I think I’ll make vi a symlink to
emacsclient from now on… ;-)
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