On my Gentoo desktops, I use Emacs Daemon via sys-emacs/emacs-daemon1
to ensure an Emacs instance is ready to go and always available from
boot. This is done via creating a symbolic link like
/etc/init.d/emacs.winston to /etc/init.d/emacs which will start Emacs
for the given user. See the package README for more details.
A shortcoming of this setup is XDG_RUNTIME_DIR2 is not set, as this is
set by my Desktop Session - maybe LightDM or consolekit set this? As a
result, when I open a URL from Emacs Daemon, it opens a fresh
qutebrowser session, loading the saved default session, and making a
mess of my workflow.
One approach to fix this might be to instead run Emacs daemon from my
.xsession script, but I rather not supervise daemons at the user
level; if I were to consider this, I’d be better off to switch to
systemd for user-level services anyway.
The solution I came up with is to add some lines to my init.el to
ensure XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is set to the expected value:
(defun winny/ensure-XDG_RUNTIME_DIR ()
"Ensure XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is set. Used by qutebrowser and other utilities."
(let ((rd (getenv "XDG_RUNTIME_DIR")))
(when (or (not rd) (string-empty-p rd))
(setenv "XDG_RUNTIME_DIR" (format "/run/user/%d" (user-uid))))))
(add-hook 'after-init-hook #'winny/ensure-XDG_RUNTIME_DIR)
A strange emacs-ism: (user-uid) returns float or integer, despite the
backing uid_t (on *nix) is guarenteed to be an integer type. I’ll just
assume this’ll never return a float. Please contact me otherwise, I’d
love to hear about this.