On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 02:03:38PM +1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
With multiple
terminals, I can have multiple editors with different
contexts. With the GUI, it all gets dumped together.
Not in my experience (GNU Emacs 29.4 (build 1,
amd64-portbld-freebsd13.3, GTK+ Version 3.24.43, cairo version
1.17.4). I have four displays on my server 0, and also 4 instances of
Emacs: one on :0.1 and three on :0.2.
Yeah, it doesn't work that way for me using GNU emacs on Debian
either.
Many decades ago I did force the behaviour that you describe; it
involved setting EDITOR to emacsclient, and then running
(server-start) in my ~/.emacs.el. This was a feature back when I was
running emacs on BSD 4.3 with a Vaxstation II/RC with 2 MiB of memory
(Digital had put epoxy into the backplane so you couldn't add more
memory to their memory-starved inexpensive model), but now that I buy
my own desktops with 64 GiB of memory, I really don't care that emacs
is "eight megabytes and constantly swapping" (well, not swapping; I
don't configure swap any more :-) and emacsclient is more annoying
than it's worth.
- Ted