The stock systemd user service file for emacs 29.1 looks like this:
[Unit]
Description=Emacs text editor
Documentation=info:emacs man:emacs(1) https://gnu.org/software/emacs/
[Service]
Type=notify
ExecStart=/usr/bin/emacs --fg-daemon
# ExecStop=/usr/bin/emacsclient --eval "(kill-emacs)"
# Emacs will exit with status 15 after having received SIGTERM, which
# is the default "KillSignal" value systemd uses to stop services.
SuccessExitStatus=15
# The location of the SSH auth socket varies by distribution, and some
# set it from PAM, so don't override by default.
# Environment=SSH_AUTH_SOCK=%t/keyring/ssh
Restart=on-failure
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
However, after my computer starts up and I login, and try to run emacsclient -c, nothing happens and journalctl -u emacs -f --user contains an error log:
Authorization required, but no authorization protocol specified
After a restart of emacs (systemctl --user restart emacs), there is no problem in starting emacs, and the emacsclient window opens up as expected. However, after a reboot, the same problem happens - clearly having to restart emacs immediately up login defeats the purpose of setting it up as a systemd user service.
After various googling, I ended up on https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsAsDaemon#h5o-19 which says that we need to ensure emacs is started up after Gnome by adding these lines:
[Unit]
[email protected]
[email protected]
The problem is that Ubuntu 22.04+ (currently running 23.10) does not have a [email protected] unit. I've tried various things like gdm.service, user@%U.service instead of gnome shell in the above section and nothing seems to work. What's the right way here?
I've also had a look at Systemd starts emacs daemon without XAUTHORITY environment variable after upgrading to Fedora 37 that mentions the same problem on gnome/x11/fedora with a slightly different solution, but that doesnt work for Gnome/Wayland/Ubuntu combination.
