How to open Emacs inside Bash

Question

Emacs takes many launch options. The one that you are looking for is emacs -nw. This will open Emacs inside the terminal disregarding the DISPLAY environment variable even if it is set. The long form of this flag is emacs --no-window-system.

More information about Emacs launch options can be found in the manual.

Just type emacs -nw. This won't open an X window.

In the spirit of providing functionality, go to your .profile or .bashrc file located at /home/usr/ and at the bottom add the line:

alias enw='emacs -nw'

Now each time you open a terminal session you just type, for example, enw and you have the Emacs no-window option with three letters :).

If you need to open Emacs without X:

emacs -nw

I didn't like the alias solution for my purposes. For one, it didn't work for setting export EDITOR="emacs -nw".

But you can pass --without-x to configure and then just the regular old Emacs will always open in terminal.

curl http://gnu.mirrors.hoobly.com/emacs/emacs-25.3.tar.xz
tar -xvzf emacs-25.3.tar.xz && cd emacs-25.3
./configure --without-x
make && sudo make install

emacs hello.c -nw

This is to open a hello.c file using Emacs inside the terminal.