How to use Emacs properly?

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I’m a heavy Emacs user. I use it for work, I use it for personal stuff. In my regular usage, I just install it either via the package manager or by building it myself and it basically replaces the terminal entirely.

Since that’s not recommended, I want to know what do you think is the recommended way to use Emacs in an immutable distro. From what I briefly investigated, there are two options:

  • Install the Emacs flatpak
  • Install Emacs inside distrobox and run it from there

I installed the Emacs flatpak before and it was a weird experience. It runs completely inside a container and, even if I explicitly allow it access to system binaries, it does not find them – meaning, no distrobox, essentially making it useless. I think I’m able to install “toolkits” from flatpak, but using them is confusing and I want to be able to access more than just what flatpak provides.

Running emacs from distrobox seems more like what I want. It’s essentially running emacs from a mutable distro with access to the installed packages – but inside a container. It’s a little annoying to have to run it like distrobox enter -- emacs instead of automatically having the system add a menu entry I can just click and start using, but this is a very minor issue. So far, this is feeling like the better option.

What do you think? Do any of you use emacs here? How do you use it?

Thanks in advance.

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If you’re doing it in a distrobox, (I assume you’re using the classic terminal based emacs?) you can run distrobox-export --bin /usr/bin/emacs from inside your distrobox, and it will add it to your standard user session, so the distrobox will automatically launch.

I don’t actually know if your basic text emacs ships with a .desktop file, if it does, you can do distrobox-export --app emacs and accomplish the same thing.

I also don’t actually know if /usr/bin/emacs is the actual executable you’d want to export (I don’t use emacs, you’d have to sort that out yourself)

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I’m not.

This worked. Thank you!

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or you can use this program, which is a front end to distrobox

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That’s a super handy application, thank you

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