Re: GUI X-FreeDesktop integration

[Peter Oliver <p.d.oliver@mavit.org.uk>]

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On Wed, 26 May 2021, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> Date: Tue, 25 May 2021 22:34:18 +0100 (BST)
>> From: Peter Oliver <p.d.oliver@mavit.org.uk>
>>
>>> In fact, the _least_ surprising from
>>> an XDG/FDO perspective would actually be to _only_ expose
>>> a "client+autolaunch" desktop entry and just call that the
>>> point of integration for Emacs.
>>
>> Agreed.  Attached is a patch which achieves this.
>
> This is a backward-incompatible change, so why should it be the
> default, and not the alternative action via right-click?

As argued by others earlier in the thread, this is consistent with the behaviour of other applications that are capable of opening multiple documents in the same window, such as Firefox or Gedit.

So, we can say that users who mostly launch things by clicking on icons in their desktops will be likely to expect things to work this way.  Conversely, it seems reasonable to worry less about catering for people who do not have this expectation, because we can infer that they rarely click on the icons.

> And anyway,
> wouldn't some people be surprised to see emacsclient frame when they
> expected a new instance of Emacs, without their say-so?

My feeling is that plenty of people will find the current behaviour surprising, too.  Opening multiple instances of emacs seems like a fairly niche thing to want to do, unless, say, you’re launching it with -Q, in which case you need to run it from the command line anyway.

-- 
Peter Oliver