If you’re running a Linux system and sometimes experience an X crash, Sacha has some advice on how to keep Emacs running. Emacs is notoriously slow to start, of course, and that alone is reason enough to be annoyed when an X crash causes it to quit. Even more annoying is losing data. Sacha was having this problem so of course she set out to solve it.
Her method rests on starting Emacs in daemon mode. That keeps things running even if X quits. By starting Emacs at boot time, all she has to do is connect to the Emacs server with
emacsclient -c
when she logs into X. After that, everything is just like before but Emacs keeps running even if X dies.
There’s a couple of gotchas so be sure to read Sacha’s post for the details. She also discusses how to get Emacs to start at boot time, which isn’t as trivial as one might hope.