Ubuntu – Set emacs -nw as default editor

If you must chase the very latest version, then you can always get the source and compile it yourself. Unless you know of some killer new feature that emacs24 has though, I'd not waste the time and just use the one that ships with Ubuntu.

There's no downsides to calling it directly, but the emacs way is to start up one emacs session when you log on and never close it. You can export EDITOR=emacsclient and run M-x server-start in emacs and things like crontab -e will prompt emacs to open the file in the other window. When you are done, you hit C-x C-# to unblock the emacsclient.

If you prefer to keep the editing in the terminal window ( of course, you can just run M-x ansi-term and do your terminal work inside an emacs buffer ), you can add -t to the emacsclient command and it will open a new emacs frame on that terminal so you can do your editing in the terminal, but still have access to all of your other buffers, the kill ring, etc.

Most utilities, including git respect an environment variable named EDITOR which you can set to any editor you want, including options. export EDITOR='emacs -nw' will have them run emacs in non windowed mode.

In the case of emacs, it has a handy server mode you can start with M-x server-start and then run emacsclient as an editor to open a file in the already running emacs instance. This is handy since it allows you to retain access to the emacs kill ring and other features. It also accepts the -nw switch so that it will open a new emacs frame in the terminal window rather than in the gui emacs frame, so it will still look and feel like a text mode emacs session, but still share the kill ring and buffers with the other window(s).