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I have setup emacs as my default editor in /etc/profile. When I want to use emacs in a terminal. I open it with the -nw option. How can I have the same behavior when doing a crontab -e preventing it to open in a window?

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migrated from serverfault.com Aug 6 '11 at 22:10


2 Answers

up vote 9 down vote accepted

You have to use

    export EDITOR="emacs -nw"

with the quotes, and it should work as expected.

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If you think starting emacs every time is slow, you can also use:

export EDITOR="emacsclient -t"

However, you will have to start the emacs server once using:

emacs --daemon
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With EDITOR="emacsclient --alternate-editor= -t", emacsclient will start Emacs in daemon mode if necessary. –  Gilles Aug 13 '11 at 22:00
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