On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 01:24:11AM -0700, Ian W wrote:
> I was wondering how difficult it would be to separate the display (front-end) and server (back-end) in emacs.

See chapter 39 "Using Emacs as a Server" in the Emacs manual
(if you prefer the browser, cf [1]).

Does this help for your use case?

Cheers
[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Emacs-Server.html
-- tomás