Spacemacs takes quite a while to load when you have added all sorts of nice modes. I have had other issues with multiple emacs open causing issues with my slack setup.

Run spacemacs with emacs in daemon mode.

The cleanest and easiest way to do this is to use systemd. So we will set up them emacs daemon to start when a user logs in. To do this we first need to create a user specific systemd folder and then create a unit file for the emacs daemon.

1. mkdir $HOME/.config/systemd/user

2. Then add the following to the unit file at $HOME/.config/systemd/user/emacs.service

   [Unit]
   Description=Emacs text editor
   Documentation=info:emacs man:emacs(1) https://gnu.org/software/emacs/
   
   [Service]
   Type=simple
   ExecStart=/usr/bin/emacs --fg-daemon
   ExecStop=/usr/bin/emacsclient --eval "(kill-emacs)"
   Environment=SSH_AUTH_SOCK=%t/keyring/ssh
   Restart=on-failure
   
   [Install]
   WantedBy=default.target
   

3. Now you can go ahead and run the daemon: systemd --user enable --now emacs

If you wanted you could leave it at that and then just run emacs using emacsclient -c -a emacs. This will create a new frame and if the emacs daemon isn't running it will use emacs. If you don't want to run emacs in a new frame just use -t instead of -c. However, no one really wants to run that every time you want to edit a file.

To address this issue the first thing to do would be to add the following to your .bashrc

alias emacs='emacsclient -t -a emacs'
export EDITOR='emacsclient -t -a emacs'
export VISUAL='emacsclient -c -a emacs'

Next we will add a desktop file for emacsclient at $HOME/.local/share/application/emacsclient.desktop containing

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Emacs (Client)
GenericName=Text Editor
Comment=Edit text
MimeType=text/english;text/plain;text/x-makefile;text/x-c++hdr;text/x-c++src;text/x-chdr;text/x-csrc;text/x-java;text/x-moc;text/x-pascal;text/x-tcl;text/x-tex;application/x-shellscript;text/x-c;text/x-c++;
Exec=emacsclient -c -a "emacs" %F
Icon=emacs
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Categories=Development;TextEditor;Utility;
StartupWMClass=Emacs
Keywords=Text;Editor;

One thing to be sure of after all this is that any special fonts are install system wide. To do this place the otf files in /usr/local/share/fonts and then run fc-cache -f.