how to run emacsclient on windows in the terminal

Question

i cannot use emacsclient on windows 10. Starting it with the gui client works well but trying to start it in command line mode from a terminal, for example running emacsclient -nw -c is there a correct way to do that?

Answer 1

On Windows there is no terminal version of Emacs, only Gui-versions. So using emacslient.exe or emacsclientw.exe is the same thing. The behave slightly different in what they tell you on the command line. emacsclient.exe starts a CMD console if run from Start menu or explorer. emacsclientw.exe is a native GUI application that starts as any Windows app.

But you can still start a daemon with multiple client windows. The first client needs to start a server if there is no running already. You do that by adding -a "" as an option. This tells Emacs to connect to the default server named "". You can start multiple servers with different names if needed. And you need to add -c to create a new frame, otherwise emacsclient reuse an existing frame. And that is useful if you want to open a file from the command line.

You can add the option --tty to emacsclient but that don't make any difference. You will get a GUI window anyway.

emacsclient.exe -c -a ""

- or-

emacsclientw.exe -c -a ""

- or -

emacsclient.exe --tty -c -a ""

All above will start a server and a window.

Or you can start the server first, either in background or foreground, and then start the emacsclient. Running a foreground server is good for troubleshooting. And the background is probably wanted when in a stable state.

emacs.exe --fg-daemon

- or -

emacs.exe --bg-daemon


emacsclient.exe -c

emacsclientw.exe -c

So the short answer, emacsclientw.exe -c -a "" should be the command you are looking for.

To start a new client, use C-x 5 2, and to close the window, C-x 5 0. And to exit Emacs, run M-x kill-emacs to kill all windows and the server.

Hopes this helps.