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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T07:59:16+00:00

Lets say I have an Emacs-Server running on some remote server, with all the

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Lets say I have an Emacs-Server running on some remote server, with all the libraries and software necessary for running my application.

Then I want several clients to connect to that remote machine, using Emacs-client. Does each client need a full Emacs installation, or is there a minimal installation that is just enough to communicate with the remote server, where all the action is?

Could this (Emacs-)client installation be so minimal, that almost all software-updates can be done on the server, without affecting the Emacs-clients?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Is there a reason not to run the clients remotely as well, and simply use a local display? That way, pretty much all you need on the local machines is the ssh client and the X Window server.

    ssh -X (user)@(server) "emacsclient -c"

    Edits for the comments:

    This command starts a new client to connect to an existing Emacs server (which it assumes is already running). You can use "emacsclient -a '' -c" to automatically start emacs --daemon if there is no existing server, but I don’t know whether you want the connecting user to be starting the server.

    In fact, I’m pretty unsure about the whole multi-user side of this to be honest, as I’ve never done that before. Authentication for the above is handled by ssh, but there may well be subsequent permission issues to deal with, or similar, when the server and the clients are started by different users.

    This approach should be possible with Windows/Cygwin as client and/or server, as Cygwin provides Emacs, OpenSSH, and X.org packages. (I regularly use Windows/Cygwin as a local display for Emacs running on Linux.) It may be harder to set up, though, and any permissions issues are probably different when you’re using Cygwin.

    I’m less sure how this would work without Cygwin. NTEmacs certainly won’t talk to X.org, so I imagine you’d be terminal based in that instance. (There are probably other options, but Cygwin sounds to me like the best-integrated approach to using all of Emacs, SSH, and X on Windows).

    Lastly, I imagine you’re probably getting your “Connection refused” error because localhost is not running a sshd daemon? I would say that configuration of ssh is outside the scope of this question, but there are lots of resources online for that.

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