Surely I'm not the only person who's wanted to run multiple distinct instances of the emacs daemon at once. Here's the use case:

I use one laptop, but I work on a number of very distinct projects many of which involve having a number of different buffers open, most of which don't overlap with each other at all. This wouldn't be a huge problem except that I've easily gotten up to two hundred buffers open at once. It can get a bit confusing. Particularly since I never really need to touch my work related stuff when I'm writing blags, and my blogging and website design buffers never intersect with fiction writing.

If I weren't using emacs in daemon mode (that is, invoked with the " emacs --daemon " command) I'd just open separate instances of emacs. The problem with that is, when X11 crashes (as it is so wont to do) the emacs instances crash too and that's no good. Under normal conditions if you start emacs as a daemon, you can only run one at a time, because it grabs a socket and the emacsclient program isn't smart enough to be able to decide which instance of emacs you want. So it's a big ball of failure.

Except I figured out a way to make this work.

In your .emacs file, at the very beginning, put the following line:

(setq server-use-tcp t)

In the default configuration, the emacs daemon listens on a UNIX/system socket. However, in emacs can also, with the above option set, can also listen for connections over TCP. I've not yet figured out how to create the required SSH tunnel to make this particularly cool, but it makes this use case possible.

Now, when you start emacs, use commands in the following form:

emacs --daemon=tychoish emacs --daemon=work

Each server process creates a state file in the " ~/.emacs.d/server/ " folder. If you are using version control on this file, you may want to consider explicitly ignoring this folder to avoid confusion.

To open an emacs client (i.e. an emacs frame attached to the emacs daemon,) use commands in the following form

emacsclient --server-file=tychoish -c -n emacsclient --server-file=work -c -n

You may append a file name to open a specific client with one of these emacsclient invocations, or use any of the other emacsclient options. Although these commands are long, I have integrated them into my default zsh configuration as aliases, and as key shortcuts in my window manager. So opening a frame on a specific emacs instance isn't particularly difficult.

And that's it. It just works. I have the following two lines in my user's crontab file:

@reboot emacs --daemon=tychoish @reboot emacs --daemon=work

These lines ensure that the usual (and expected) named emacs daemons are started following reboot. More generally, the @reboot cronjob is great for making the "my computer just rebooted, and now I have to fuss over it for ten minutes before I can work" problem seem much less daunting.

In conclusion I'd like to present one piece of unsolicited advice, and ask a question the assembled.

Advice : Even though it's possible to create a large number of emacs instances, and on modern systems the required RAM is pretty low, avoid this temptation. The more emacs instances you have to juggle the greater the chance that you'll forget what buffers are open in what instance. Undesirable.

: Even though it's possible to create a large number of emacs instances, and on modern systems the required RAM is pretty low, avoid this temptation. The more emacs instances you have to juggle the greater the chance that you'll forget what buffers are open in what instance. Undesirable. Question: Is there a way to get the value of server-name in into emacs lisp so that I can if things against it? Haven't figured this one out yet, but it seems like it would be nice for conditionally loading buffers and things like org-mode agenda. Any ideas?

Onward and Upward!