I use emacs --daemon with emacsclient for this. I always have a running emacs instance, and connect with the client. Opening and quitting a client is near instant.
Yup. I've aliased it to e and and it works just fine. Sort of "send file into Emacs". I've also added some elisp to say things like e something.c:43 so that it opens it up at line 43.
I used have a ep which I could pipe something into and it would put it in Emacs buffer but that stopped working somewhere I never got around to fixing it.
I used emacs for about 16 years, but never properly gotten into client-daemon setup. What’s your setup? Does the daemon preserve open buffers and stuff, so when you connect you have all your openned stuff? Or each emacs sessions have separate set of buffers and windows?
Yes to some extent. When you attach to it, the default screen will still be scratch, but all your buffers are still open. There are some settings you can set to fix that, if it's burdensome.
I used have a ep which I could pipe something into and it would put it in Emacs buffer but that stopped working somewhere I never got around to fixing it.