Emacs Deamon Mode on macos

A common complaint about emacs is that it takes longer to launch than vim. I enjoyed being able to quickly edit a file without leaving the terminal in vim and wanted to know if there was a way to make emacs load just as fast. I have many emacs plugins through Spacemacs, and it does take around 10-20 seconds to launch in both terminal and GUI mode. With emacs client mode, it launches in less than a second.

Emacs client and Server

Instead of launching a full emacs client every time you want to edit a file, it’s better to launch emacs as a daemon in headless mode when your computer starts up. If an emacs process is already running, you can connect to it using the emacsclient command.

emacsclient and emacsclient -c

emacsclient launches a terminal client to a local emacs process and launches just as quickly as vim.

emacsclient -c opens a separate GUI instance.

launchd and macos Launch Agents

If we frequently use emacs, we can have the macOS process manager start an emacs daemon on login and restart it if the daemon dies.

LaunchAgent.plist

Create this file in

~/Library/LaunchAgents/gnu.emacs.daemon.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>gnu.emacs.daemon</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
  <string>/usr/local/bin/emacs</string>
  <string>--daemon</string>
</array>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<true/>
<key>ServiceDescription</key>
<string>Gnu Emacs Daemon</string>
</dict>
</plist>

launchctl load on startup

This command will start the deamon and ensure it is started on every login.

launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/gnu.emacs.daemon.plist

You can also use unload to stop the daemon and prevent it from starting next login.

Load

launchctl load -w <path> loads and starts the process while also marking the process as “not disabled.” The process will restart on the next login/reboot.

Unload

launchctl unload -w <path> stops and unloads and disables the process. The process will NOT restart on the next login/restart.

emacsclient

Now that we have a daemon always running, we can quickly launch emacs by running emacsclient -c or emacsclient. It should be restarted automatically if we ever need to kill the emacs daemon.