Re: GUI X-FreeDesktop integration

[Robin Tarsiger <rtt@dasyatidae.com>]

Boruch Baum wrote:
> My suggestion would be: Connect to an Emacs server.
> 
> But, I'd prefer that the emacsclient developers decide.

I would like to advance "Open a window in an existing Emacs
editor session" or something along those lines as closer to
the high-level user intent involved, with "and the Emacs
server must be running for this to work" as just a background
precondition. "connect to a server" is easy to interpret as
accessing a third-party network resource, on the surface,
and desktop entry descriptions may be displayed well out
of context as part of lists of other applications. (That
is also why I suggest "window" instead of "frame" above;
the description is desktop-environment-facing, so I would
use that terminology preferentially to Emacs-native terms.)

There's a separate question of whether autolaunch (-a "")
should be enabled. Boruch's initial suggestion included it,
but the current Git version doesn't. On balance, I'd tend
to think of it as less surprising from a desktop perspective
for it to be enabled. In fact, the _least_ surprising from
an XDG/FDO perspective would actually be to _only_ expose
a "client+autolaunch" desktop entry and just call that the
point of integration for Emacs... that would mirror the
behavior of e.g. LibreOffice, Firefox, and many other popular
applications. In that case, you just have something like
"Edit text using Emacs". Or perhaps something longer with
a bit more sparkle to it: imagine a user seeing this entry
and asking "why would I want to edit text using Emacs rather
than something else?"---if there's short-enough phrasing that
can hint at an answer...

-RTT