Re: Change in emacsclient behavior

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

> Normally I don't use several frames, but for emacsclients I like the new
> behavior.  Making it depend on pop-up-frames wouldn't help me, so I'm
> for the reversed behavior of the -c option, too.

How about the following default behavior of emacsclient:

1. When invoked without arguments, display the current frame (-c uses the
current frame, but this could be customizable to display the initial frame
or any of existing frames).

2. When invoked with -e or --eval, display the current frame and eval the
expression on this frame.

3. When invoked with one FILE argument, create a new frame with the file
buffer.

4. When invoked with multiple FILE arguments, create either one frame with
windows containing all specified files' buffers, or if `pop-up-frames' is
non-nil, create as many frames as there are file arguments (starting a new
Emacs session already does this).

The reason that is usually it's undesirable to change the window configuration
of the current frame when visiting new files.  However, evaluation of the
expression can change it as well, e.g. emacsclient -e '(info)'.  So the
argument -c is still needed to force either creating a new frame or using
the current one.  Of course, when parsing is done on the Emacs side, this
gives the user more power to decide what exactly to do.

> But then -c --current-frame would't make sense.

One possible mnemonic for -c is --create-frame.

BTW, does anyone know how to start a detached Emacs server so that after
logout and login I could connect to it with emacsclient?

I tried

  nohup emacs -nw -f server-start

but it writes to nohup.out

  emacs: standard input is not a tty

and exits.  Then I tried with the -batch argument, but this
doesn't work neither.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/