bug#7741: More about folding emacsclient into emacs

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org>]

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I've just been drawn back to look at this bug. Another way of looking at
it: currently, "Emacs 24" is the default application for many text
filetypes under GNOME. For many users, this is annoying, as it starts a new
instance of Emacs each time.

I have configured "emacsclient" as a text editor in my system (this does
not seem to be available by default), but I then still have to configure it
as the default editor for each file type in Nautilus.

One option would be to offer "emacsclient" as the default, but that's also
confusing, for users who don't know about emacsclient.

So again, it would be good if emacsclient were folded into emacs. I just
had a look at their respective command-line options, and I can't see any
that clash (where the same option is used for both programs, it's used for
the same thing).

What would remain is to add options --[no]client to force "emacs" to [not]
behave as "emacsclient", and decide a sensible default policy. A sensible
place to start seems to be to behave like emacsclient when called with
--alternate-editor="", that is, try to connect to a server, and if one
can't be found, start normally (emacsclient would instead run "emacs
--daemon" here and try to connect to it).

Regardless of whether anyone feels like hacking on this, I'd like to know
whether it's a tractable design problem (have I missed anything major?) and
clikely to be accepted. If so, I might be up for hacking on it.

-- 
http://rrt.sc3d.org

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