How to close a emacsclient gui frame without killing the server

Question

How do you close an emacsclient frame without killing the server/daemon?

Doing C-x C-c or C-x 5 0 in the gui will exit both frame and server (and other clients), while this just quit the current frame when done from terminal.

(Ps: My emacs version is 24.2,gtk. I've tried without init-file to see if it was coming from my config, but results were the same)

Answer 1

From the minibuffer, when emacsclient starts:

When done with a buffer, type C-x #

Answer 2

I think the key point here is you need to start the server in daemon mode. If the server runs in an existing emacs process - for instance if you have (server-start) in your init file - the server dies with the emacs process.

There are a couple of ways of starting the server in daemon mode:

• call emacs with the --daemon command line option
• call emacsclient with the --alternate-editor="" command line option, which will in effect run emacs --daemon for you then attempt to connect to it

Once you have the server in daemon mode, you should be able to close any frames and the daemon will continue to sit and wait for further connections.

Answer 3

Starting the emacsclient with -n/--no-wait flag will:

Don't wait for the server to return

You won't need to close the client in that case.

And if you have to a close emacsclient just kill the buffer the server will remain intact.