emacsclient questions

emacsclient questions

[Klaus Zeitler]

With emacs 22 I thought it's about time to drop the gnuserv package and
use emacsclient instead. It seems emacsclient has now all the features I need.
But I've noticed a few minor quirks. Here are my observations:


1. The emacsclient versions of emacs 22 and CVS emacs behave
   unfortunately a bit different. I don't know if that's an oversight
   or a deliberate change. I'm switching between emacs 22 and CVS emacs
   quite often.

First try with emacs 22 and CVS emacsclient

i. start emacs 22.2
emacs -Q&

ii. use CVS emacsclient
.../cvs/bin/emacsclient --eval "(message \"test\")"

iii. no immediate response from emacs instead
     a buffer -current-frame" opens in emacs 22 and one needs to type 'C-x #'
     Now emacsclient reports:
*ERROR*: Unknown message: "test"


Now the other way with CVS emacs and emacsclient from 22.2

i. start CVS emacs
.../cvs/bin/emacs -Q&

ii. use emacsclient from 22.2
emacsclient --eval "(message \"test\")"

iii. emacsclient prints: '-print "test"' instead of just '"test"'


2. Do we really need the quotes around a string, i.e.

emacsclient --eval "(message \"test\")"
returns "test" whereas gnudoit in the gnuserv packages returns the
string without quotes. I have shell scripts that communicate with an
emacs server via emacsclient. Now I have to deal with those extra
quotes.


3. emacsclient --eval t returns t but emacsclient --eval nil returns nothing


4. emacsclient --eval some-not-existing-variable returns to stdout
*ERROR*: Symbol's value as variable is void: some-not-existing-variable
Wouldn't it better to write this to stderr?
Shouldn't emacsclient return an exit value /= 0 in this case?


Opinions anyone?

Klaus

-- 
 --------------------------------------------------
|  Klaus Zeitler      Alcatel-Lucent               |
|  Email:             kzeitler@alcatel-lucent.com  |
 --------------------------------------------------
---
"Uncle Cosmo ... why do they call this a word processor?"
"It's simple, Skyler ... you've seen what food processors
do to food, right?"                  -- MacNelley, "Shoe"