Emacs Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for those using, extending or developing Emacs. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I would like to be able to exit emacs without saving changes.
I might have started editing some configuration file, then decided that I don't want to save the changes.
In vi I would issue the q! command to exit the editor. I don't know if there is an emacs alternative for this.
To exit emacs, use C-xC-c. It will ask you whether you want to save the changes. To prevent the question, precede the combination with C-u (but it will save the changes).
If you want to kill Emacs without saving any changes, you can use the kill-emacs function (M-xkill-emacs). If you need it often, you can assing it to any key combination you like.
E.g. add this to your init file:
(global-set-key "\C-x\M-c" 'kill-emacs)
No server buffers remain to edit
C-x k. But that's not the point of the question. If you're running in a terminal, press C-z to put emacs into background.
man pages as man-mode. When I press q I just want to exit emacs without saving any changes, but keep emacs-daemon running. I don't want to suspend because it won't close the latest open buffer
In most cases, an emacs instance runs for a very long time: what comes and goes is the buffer visiting a file. So instead of killing emacs as a whole, it is probably more useful to kill the buffer that is visiting the file.
You do that with kill-buffer (usually bound to C-x k): if the buffer is modified it will ask you whether you want to kill it anyway and you can answer "yes".
