Making emacsclient more friendly toward multiple terminal tabs

Making emacsclient more friendly toward multiple terminal tabs

[Aaron Meurer]

Hi.

I've been using emacsclient in the terminal as my editor for some
time, and it works pretty well.  There are a few issues, though, where
one emacsclient will interact with another in annoying ways.  My setup
is that I have several terminal tabs open, and I run emacsclient in
each one whenever I want to edit a file.  I start emacsclient with
emacsclient -a "" -nw (via a bash alias).  Here are some issues that I
encounter:

- If one emacsclient has a question in the minibuffer, then the others
are all locked out until I answer the question.  For example, if I
modify a file without saving and do C-x C-c, it asks me if I want to
save.  All other emacsclients are locked out completely until I answer
yes or no.  Even C-g or ESC ESC ESC have no effect (nor do y or n).

- Very often, when I close an emacsclient (with C-x C-s C-x C-c), it
bugs me about saving buffers in other emacsclients.

- If I open a file, make a change, then close it without saving, and
reopen it, the change is still there.  I understand why this happens,
because the buffer remains open in the daemon, but this is not really
what I want.

- If I do C-x C-f, the directory that it gives me is very often not
the directory I am cd'd into for that particular emacsclient, but one
from another emacsclient.

If anyone can offer suggestions to fix any of these issues, it would
be greatly appreciated, as they are all quite annoying (especially the
second one). I get why these things happen, because emacsclient shares
all buffers with the one daemon, but I'd rather it act as if it
didn't.  My main motivation for using emacsclient over vanilla emacs
is the enormous speed benefit when starting it.

If anyone cares, my .emacs is at
https://github.com/asmeurer/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs.

Aaron Meurer

Re: Making emacsclient more friendly toward multiple terminal tabs

[Gregor Zattler]

Hi Aaron,
* Aaron Meurer <asmeurer@gmail.com> [02. Apr. 2012]:
> - Very often, when I close an emacsclient (with C-x C-s C-x C-c), it
> bugs me about saving buffers in other emacsclients.

The way to close editing documents opend with one emacsclient is
server-edit per default bound to 'C-x #'.

 
> - If I open a file, make a change, then close it without saving, and
> reopen it, the change is still there.  I understand why this happens,
> because the buffer remains open in the daemon, but this is not really
> what I want.

Also, if you use server-edit to close a buffer, you are then
asked if you want to save the buffer.  If not it's unchanged when
you open the file next time with emacsclient.  This brings up
your other problemn about stopping Emacs with open prompts.


Ciao, Gregor
-- 
 -... --- .-. . -.. ..--.. ...-.-

Re: Making emacsclient more friendly toward multiple terminal tabs

[Aaron Meurer]

On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 3:31 AM, Gregor Zattler <telegraph@gmx.net> wrote:
> Hi Aaron,
> * Aaron Meurer <asmeurer@gmail.com> [02. Apr. 2012]:
>> - Very often, when I close an emacsclient (with C-x C-s C-x C-c), it
>> bugs me about saving buffers in other emacsclients.
>
> The way to close editing documents opend with one emacsclient is
> server-edit per default bound to 'C-x #'.

OK, I guessed this might solve at least some of the problems.  How do
I rebind C-x C-c to server-edit when I'm in emacsclient mode, but
still use save-buffers-kill-terminal in regular emacs (which I do
occasionally use)?

Aaron Meurer

>
>
>> - If I open a file, make a change, then close it without saving, and
>> reopen it, the change is still there.  I understand why this happens,
>> because the buffer remains open in the daemon, but this is not really
>> what I want.
>
> Also, if you use server-edit to close a buffer, you are then
> asked if you want to save the buffer.  If not it's unchanged when
> you open the file next time with emacsclient.  This brings up
> your other problemn about stopping Emacs with open prompts.
>
>
> Ciao, Gregor
> --
>  -... --- .-. . -.. ..--.. ...-.-
>