Restart Emacs
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** Table of contents :TOC_3_gh:
** What is this? This is a simple package to restart Emacs for within Emacs. Inspired by [[http://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/5428/restart-emacs-from-within-emacs][this]] stackoverflow question.
** Installation *** ELPA ~restart-emacs~ is available on [[http://melpa.org/#/restart-emacs][MELPA]] and [[http://stable.melpa.org/#/restart-emacs][MELPA Stable]]. Please follow the instructions on MELPA [[http://melpa.org/#/getting-started][website]] to enable it, if you haven't already.
You can then install ~restart-emacs~ from the [[https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Package-Menu.html][package menu]]. Alternatively install it by doing the following
Refresh the package index
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
M-x package-refresh-contents RET
#+END_QUOTE
And then install it by doing
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
M-x package-install RET restart-emacs
#+END_QUOTE
*** El-get ~restart-emacs~ can also be installed using ~el-get~. Assuming you have latest version of el-get installing it by doing something similar to
M-x el-get-install RET restart-emacs
#+END_QUOTE
** Usage It offers a command ~restart-emacs~ which kills current Emacs session and starts a new session.
Additional arguments to be passed to the new instance can be specified using prefix arguments
with three ~universal-argument~ (=C-u= =C-u= =C-u=) the user is prompted for the arguments
~restart-emacs~ can restore frames on restart, right this is experimental and disabled by default to enable it set ~restart-emacs-restore-frames~ to ~t~.
There is also a second command ~restart-emacs-start-new-emacs~ which starts a new session of Emacs without killing the current one. It takes the same arguments as ~restart-emacs~.
** Compatibility *** Restarting GUI Emacs Restarting graphical Emacs should work on any UNIXy system with ~sh~ and on Windows.
*** Restarting Emacs running in a terminal This requires that the shell from which Emacs was launched supports job control. This has been tested to work on ~sh~, ~bash~, ~zsh~, ~fish~, ~csh~ and ~tcsh~, however this does not work on Windows.
*** Restarting Emacs daemons The latest version of ~restart-emacs~ can now restart Emacs daemons. The the frames are restored once the daemon restarts using ~desktop-mode~. However since ~desktop-mode~ learned to restore frames only Emacs version 24.4 onwards the daemons can be restarted only on Emacs versions 24.4 and later.
Another issue with restarting Emacs daemons is that the frames open in a
terminal cannot be recreated on restart, instead the ~restart-emacs~ would
write a notification on the terminal with the instructions to reconnect, any
suggestions to improve this are welcome.
** Contributing Code as well as documentation contributions are welcome.
[[https://github.com/cask/cask][Cask]] is used to manage project dependencies so make sure you have it installed. To run the tests you need to install the dependencies by running the following
cask install
After the installation completes you can run the tests by running the following command
cask exec ert-runner
Known Issues ** Command line arguments are not preserved The new Emacs instance does not use the same command line arguments as the running instance. See [[https://github.com/iqbalansari/restart-emacs/issues/11][#11]] for more details The restarted daemon quits as soon as the all the visible frames are killed See https://github.com/iqbalansari/restart-emacs/issues/10#issuecomment-307565719