How to open Emacs inside Bash

If you need to open Emacs without X:

emacs -nw

Just type emacs -nw. This won't open an X window.

Emacs takes many launch options. The one that you are looking for is emacs -nw. This will open Emacs inside the terminal disregarding the DISPLAY environment variable even if it is set. The long form of this flag is emacs --no-window-system.

More information about Emacs launch options can be found in the manual.

In the spirit of providing functionality, go to your .profile or .bashrc file located at /home/usr/ and at the bottom add the line:

alias enw='emacs -nw'

Now each time you open a terminal session you just type, for example, enw and you have the Emacs no-window option with three letters :).