When killing an emacsclient terminal via C-x C-c, it should prompt to save the files initially passed to emacsclient. To see this in action: $ emacs -Q --daemon $ emacsclient -a "" -c foo.txt $ emacsclient -a "" -c bar.txt ;; In the first client frame: foobar ;; Insert some text C-x C-c ;; Emacs prompts "Save file /path/to/foo.txt?..." Now try the above, but call `(server-stop-automatically 'delete-frame)' first (or replace `delete-frame' with `kill-terminal'; it doesn't matter). In this case, Emacs doesn't prompt to save the file. However, the docstring/comments in `server-save-buffers-kill-terminal' say that it should: "Offer to save each buffer, then kill the current client. ... Only files from emacsclient file list." Attached is a patch to restore this behavior when stopping the server automatically. This puts all of the logic into `server-save-buffers-kill-terminal', which allows `server-stop-automatically--handle-delete-frame' to be simpler. I've also added some more detailed comments explaining the logic here, since there are some pretty subtle aspects to it. There's a further subtlety that I should probably mention here though: when killing a nowait frame, it would kill Emacs entirely if that were the last frame (even in Emacs 28, and probably earlier). The only way (that I can think of) that this could come up would be to run: $ emacs -Q --eval '(start-server)' $ emacsclient -n C-x 5 0 ;; in the non-client frame C-x C-c ;; in the emacsclient frame However, when doing this with a regular (non-nowait) client, the last step would report the error "Attempt to delete the sole visible or iconified frame". Even more oddly, it would work the *second* time you tried to kill the client terminal, since `server-delete-client' would set the `client' frame-parameter to nil before deleting it; on the second attempt, Emacs thinks the frame is a non-client frame (even though it is). I've fixed this in the second patch by following the nowait behavior: if you kill a client and *all* the existing frames belong to that client, it kills Emacs entirely. I'm not sure this will come up often in practice, but it's a fairly simple change. Some tests would be nice to prevent this from regressing, but I'm not sure how to write a test that starts up a daemon and connects clients to it...