Emacsclient, multiple displays and hanging

[Greg Detre <gdetre@gmail.com>]

Dear all,

I try to keep the same Emacs session on my laptop running for days and
weeks at a time. When I'm at work, I want to be able to use that same
emacs session on my desktop. So I sit at my desktop and ssh into my
laptop, using emacsclient and 'make-frame-on-display' to bring up a
new emacsclient session on my desktop, continuing where I left off.
This works phenomenally for me.

The problem comes when I remove my laptop. If I forgot to close all
the running emacsclient windows on my desktop, then emacs on my laptop
hangs (since it's waiting for some kind of X input from the
emacsclient running on my desktop). Obviously the solution is to
always shut all the emacsclients on my desktop before unplugging my
laptop, but I forget about twice a week, and have to kill -9 my laptop
emacs :(

I've spent a fair while scouring emacsclient tips and documentation,
but nobody appears to have mentioned this issue. Does anybody have any
ideas for how to fix or work around this?

Yours,
   Greg

P.S. I wrote a tiny wrapper for Emacsclient to try and make it
friendlier for the use case I outlined above. Feel free to grab it
from here:

http://gregdetre.blogspot.com/2007/05/my-take-on-emacsclient.html