I grew up on emacs. One of my first jobs I sat down at a terminal and was editing some files with pico, it’s what I knew since I used that fantastic email client pine. I was quickly told by my the lead developer that I need to use a real text editor if I’m going to progress in my career. He told me I need to try emacs, and after suffering through a few weeks of memorizing multi command-char sequences and training the muscle memory in my pinky to perform bizarre contortions of my left hand just to save my file, I became a convert. I found out a few months later that the developer who convinced me to use emacs was a vi user all along. I think I was a victim of a cruel joke or hazing ritual, but I learned to love emacs, and when I am not coding in a desktop IDE (IntelliJ) then I am using emacs.
However most base server installs don’t come with emacs, and emacs installs a ton of extra libraries and dependencies. Emacs often takes a considerable bit of time to install as packages are downloaded and compiled depending on the platform.
As the world, and my company has been rapidly moving to containerization, I find Docker installed on more servers. Docker lets me leverage something I have been doing a lot of lately: container-as-command. Like monolithic or microservices, websites, databases, and on and on, containers give us dependency isolation. So with the only requirement being Docker, I can run any utility that I can slide into a little Alpine Linux container.
Running emacs
Since I don’t want to type out a long docker run command every time I want emacs I give my .bashrc an alias command.
alias emacs='docker run --rm -it -v "$PWD":/src -v "$HOME":/root cjimti/emacs'
Now I source my .bashrc with source ~/.bashrc and I instantly have emacs on any Docker installed server or workstation. I use this on my local workstation as well as servers.
WARNING: Mounting a home directory with an unknown container can be a big security problem, and you would need a lot of trust in the container you are letting mount this directory.
- You can use the cjimti/emacs container as-is and trust me.
- You can use the cjimti/emacs container as-is and adjust the alias not to mount your home directory. Use a persistent volume for .emacs and related files.
- You can make your own container.
This blog post, titled: "Don't Install Emacs: Containers as utility applications" by Craig Johnston, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
