Re: How come emacsclient --create-frame doesn't understand -geometry?

[Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> > Adam Sjøgren wrote:
>> 
>> >> /usr/bin/emacsclient: unrecognized option '-geometry'
>> 
>> > Try --frame-parameters instead.
> [...]
>
> Emacsclient expects you to specify the geometry as an alist, not as an
> X-style geometry spec.
>
>> Anyway, that wasn't really an answer to the question.
>
> It wasn't?  Why not?

Well, the more general question is, why is the command line interface of
emacsclient not consistent with the command line interface of emacs, at
least in the cases where they could?

emacs has tons of "Display options" that specify the appearance of its X
frame, while emacsclient has not.

To try to give some answer: The emacs display options affect all frames
you are going to create from that instance, i.e., emacs --reverse-video
followed by C-x 5 2 will create another X frame in reverse video.  In
the emacsclient -c case, you'd probably only want to set the frame
parameters of exactly that frame.  Furthermore, emacsclient has 3
different invocation styles:

  1) use an existing frame: In that case, those options should probably
     be ignored
  2) create a new terminal frame: In that case, many options are not
     applicable at all, e.g., --geometry is not, but --reverse-video is
     ok
  3) create a new X frame: Only here the options would be generally
     applicable (but with different semantics as in the emacs case)

Well, that basically says only that it's probably quite some work to add
those options and handle all possible cases, so that nobody has
implemented it yet. :-)

Bye,
Tassilo
-- 
(What the world needs (I think) is not
      (a Lisp (with fewer parentheses))
      but (an English (with more.)))
Brian Hayes, http://tinyurl.com/3y9l2kf