Please have emacs-nox alternative

[Reuben Thomas]

Binary package hint: emacs-snapshot

It's good that one can install a non-X version of Emacs, as it starts up faster than the gtk version. Hence, it would be good to be able to always start "emacs-nox" regardless of which version one has installed. Could an emacs-nox alternative be arranged, like the emacs alternative? Obviously, only -nox versions would qualify (whereas a -nox version of emacs is a perfectly good emacs alternative).

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Sat Sep 20 12:32:38 2008
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.04
NonfreeKernelModules: ath_hal
Package: emacs-snapshot 1:20080228-1ubuntu1
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/NX/bin:/usr/local/epocemx/bin:/home/username/bin:/home/username/local/i686/bin:/home/username/local/bin:/home/username/.luarocks/bin:/home/username/Work/Adsensus/svn/nancy/trunk:/home/username/Work/Adsensus/svn/adsensus/trunk:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
SourcePackage: emacs-snapshot
Uname: Linux 2.6.24-19-generic i686

[Romain Francoise (rfrancoise)]

The -nox variant exists to avoid having to install tons of unwanted
dependencies on servers and other minimal environments, not because
it starts up faster. If you really want Emacs to start up fast,
just run a server in the background and create a new tty frame with
emacsclient -t, it's instantaneous.

[Reuben Thomas (rrt)]

In general there's no way to know that Emacs will be running for a particular user, and if one has to start it up, the delay is not avoided. It's nice to use emacsclient if a server happens to be running, but if it's not, then it's also nice if ALTERNATE_EDITOR is set to something that starts up fast. This is also useful for user accounts e.g. root that do not typically have applications running persistently.

A source build of emacs with all optional dependencies turned off starts up really fast; how about emacs-minimal?

[Reuben Thomas (rrt)]

By the way, the proof that there is demand for this functionality is the popularity of Zile (of which I am the upstream maintainer). Zile does have a niche on resource-constrained systems, but I would like to be able to do away with it for most uses; however, for quick startup it still beats Emacs in general (i.e. if one doesn't already have an Emacs server running; and I don't think this is always either desirable or even possible).