Why won't a new emacs window open in x11

Question

When I type emacs & in X11, a new window doesn't open. Instead I just get the PID of the process. This illustrates what I mean.

bash-3.2$ emacs &
[1] 38624

Why is this happening and how can I get emacs to open in a separate window?

Answer 1

You can't start terminal Emacs as a background job -- it needs to interact with the terminal. Whenever a background job attempts to write to the tty, it is immediately stopped.

I would expect that your next input into the terminal would have resulted in a message similar to this?

[1]+  Stopped                 emacs

(which would have been useful).

You could then foreground the job with fg .

Running emacs & only makes any sense with GUI Emacs.