local emacs and a remote emacs daemon

local emacs and a remote emacs daemon

[Perry Smith]

On my Mac laptop I have a local emacs running.  On a remote host, I have emacs running in server / daemon mode.  The local laptop is a Mac while the remote machine is Ubuntu so the two emacs do not have a common window system.  I could (and have) installed XQuartz to the Mac can display X11 clients but I’m not sure that helps in this case.

Has any work been done to allow the local emacs to open a new frame and display a buffer on the remote emacs server?

It appears as if the remote daemon is able to run lisp expressions and communicate the results back.

Probably the best way to help me is to point me to the fundamental functions involved.  In effect, how does emacsclient “talk” to a daemon.  I assume there are some primitives that the rest of the functionality is built up from.  I’m assuming that the functionality built into emacsclient is also built into emacs (to rephrase, there is nothing essential in emacsclient that isn’t also in emacs).

Thank you for your time,
Perry

Re: local emacs and a remote emacs daemon

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Perry Smith <pedz@easesoftware.com>
> Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2019 08:13:14 -0500
> 
> Probably the best way to help me is to point me to the fundamental functions involved.  In effect, how does emacsclient “talk” to a daemon.  I assume there are some primitives that the rest of the functionality is built up from.  I’m assuming that the functionality built into emacsclient is also built into emacs (to rephrase, there is nothing essential in emacsclient that isn’t also in emacs).

The protocol between emacsclient and Emacs is in emacsclient.c and in
server.el.  in the latter you will see the commands that the client
sends and how each command is executed; you can then look up those
commands in the client source and see when each command is sent.

Re: local emacs and a remote emacs daemon

[VanL]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> The protocol between emacsclient and Emacs is in emacsclient.c and in
> server.el.  in the latter you will see the commands that the client
> sends and how each command is executed; you can then look up those
> commands in the client source and see when each command is sent.

A problem that needs fixing is EmacsMac's `emacsclient -t' which doesn't work.

-- 
© 2019 VanL
gpg using EEF2 37E9 3840 0D5D 9183  251E 9830 384E 9683 B835
          'If the bug bites don't fight it.' - Nancy S. Steinhardt

Re: local emacs and a remote emacs daemon

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: VanL <van@scratch.space>
> Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2019 20:04:27 +1000
> 
> A problem that needs fixing is EmacsMac's `emacsclient -t' which doesn't work.

It doesn't work on Windows, either.  The implementation uses
techniques that are hard to follow on non-Posix systems.  The main
obstacle is the notion of opening an existing console device from
another program.

Volunteers are welcome.

Re: local emacs and a remote emacs daemon

[Stefan Monnier]

> It doesn't work on Windows, either.  The implementation uses
> techniques that are hard to follow on non-Posix systems.

Indeed.  Another approach would be to make the emacsclient process do
all the tty management, and then introduce some protocol to send tty
commands between `emacs` and `emacsclient`.

Patches welcome ;-)


        Stefan