I suspect that even for many hardcore emacs users it is something other than emacs .

The $EDITOR environment variable determines which editor is run to change the contents of files by various unix commands. Until a few weeks ago, my $EDITOR and $P4EDITOR variables were both set to vi. Why?

Starting my emacs takes a few seconds on a local server and up to a minute on a remote server (because of X). I could use emacsclient which connects to an already running emacs. I would also have to change my work habits and access remote servers using tramp. Doing that would be inconvenient and a better solution for me is to start a stripped-down emacs-in-a-terminal.

The first thing to do is to set up a simple file which loads your basic configuration. I call this one basic-emacs.el.

basic-emacs.el

(add-to-list 'load-path (expand-file-name "~/emacs-files" )) ( require ' my-defaults ) ( require ' my-utils )

Then set your EDITOR variables in .bashrc for example.

.bashrc

EDITOR = 'emacs -nw -q --load ~/emacs-files/basic-emacs.el' P4EDITOR =$ EDITOR export EDITOR P4EDITOR

The q flag prevents emacs from loading your .emacs

The nw flag runs emacs in a terminal