I didn't like the alias solution for my purposes. For one, it didn't work for setting export EDITOR="emacs -nw"
.
But you can pass --without-x
to configure and then just the regular old Emacs will always open in terminal.
curl http://gnu.mirrors.hoobly.com/emacs/emacs-25.3.tar.xz
tar -xvzf emacs-25.3.tar.xz && cd emacs-25.3
./configure --without-x
make && sudo make install