Running Emacs in the same window as command line

Question

How to make Emacs to be started by emacs in the same window as command line? I can do it by typing emacs -nw, but can I put a line into .emacs so that it would work automatically?

Answer 1

The short answer is "no".

By the time your .emacs is read, the choice whether to use a graphical or non-graphical display has been made.

Perhaps a shell alias would better suit your needs

alias emacs 'emacs -nw'

You can verify this by adding

(y-or-n-p "Sourcing .emacs...")

at the top of your .emacs and run both graphical and non-graphical variants of Emacs, either way you get prompted after the Emacs has come up (graphically or non-graphically).

Answer 2

The other thing to keep in mind is that most Linux distributions have a package which allows for the installation of emacs without graphical support. On Debian-based distros this is emacs-nox. Furthermore, since the development of emacs23 was completed, emacs now has a daemon mode so you can use emacsclient to connect to a single running instance of emacs. This might give you some flexibility if you desire the ability to use both graphical and non-graphical clients.