Re: [OT] emacsclient -t (was Re: [OT] Have you also got hooked by Vim?)

[Erik Iverson <eriki@ccbr.umn.edu>]

Jeff Horn wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 11:00 AM, Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
>> Matt Lundin <mdl@imapmail.org> writes:
>>
>>> Jeff Horn <jrhorn424@gmail.com> writes:
>>>
>>>> On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 9:51 PM, Matt Lundin <mdl@imapmail.org> wrote:
>>>>> alias emacs="emacsclient -t -a /usr/bin/emacs"
>>>> Thanks for sharing this. My manual doesn't mention the -t flag. What
>>>> does it do? (I didn't know about -a, but it looks nifty)
>>>>
>>> Now that I consider this further (and read the emacs man page), I'm not
>>> sure if the -t flag is correct here. (It may be new to emacs 24).
>>>
>>> In any case, "-nw" is the tried and true flag for doing this.
>> IIRC, -t is the same as -nw and is present from emacs 23.1 (maybe
>> earlier) onwards.  Very useful when connecting from a non-graphical
>> terminal (e.g. a mobile phone) to an existing Emacs running on
>> X... something I do frequently via =screen= for emulating a persistent
>> connection.
> 
> So IIUC, I have a windowed Emacsen running on a box where I work. If I
> run `emacsclient -t somefile.txt` from an SSH connection to that box,
> it uses the server that was started by the windowed emacs, but instead
> of opening the file in the windowed emacs, it re-routes it to my SSH
> session?

Even possibly better, if you've got X-forwarding enabled on your
SSH connection, you can start a windowed emacs instance on your
local machine that exactly matches the one on the server, even
with all the same buffers open, processes running, etc.

I use this type of setup at home.  You need to start emacs in
'daemon' mode, see 
http://emacs-fu.blogspot.com/2009/02/emacs-daemon.html , for
example.  That site has examples of how to use it.

One caveat. I use Ubuntu, and I think I had to do something
special with my Xauth file for this to work, please follow
up if you run into trouble and use Ubuntu, and I'll be glad
to look into what I did.

--Erik