Emacs: have save-buffer happen in background

Question

Emacs seems to save synchronously, i.e. the interface locks up during a save.

This is especially noticeable when using tramp.

Is there any way to have the save happen in the background?

Answer 1

I don't think you can for a user-initiated save. AFAIK Emacs (at least GNU Emacs) is not multithreaded so you can't kick off an asynchronous save.

Answer 2

Emacs runs in a single thread and there is no way to work around this. As a matter of fact making Emacs multi-threaded is one of the most voted features for Emacs 24. So you're out of luck, at least for now... On the positive side imagine the pain of the users reading their mail in Emacs, while waiting to synchronize their huge mailboxes ;-)