after doing: emacs -Q -f server-start& emacsclient -t & from a terminal, the terminal gets corrupted. The terminal shows the emacs buffer, but the shell and not emacs receives the keystrokes. Expected behaviour would be to stop emacsclient immediately when it is started in the backround and needs the current tty. This would be consistent with behaviour of "emacs -Q -nw &" The attached patch for emacsclient.c fixes this problem by checking if emacsclient is started in the background, and raising SIGSTOP, if that is the case. This fixes the problem for me, but I cannot guarantee that this has no side effects. In GNU Emacs 24.3.1 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.10.7) of 2014-01-28 on var-lib-archbuild-extra-x86_64-juergen Windowing system distributor `The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.11500000 System Description: Arch Linux Configured using: `configure '--prefix=/usr' '--sysconfdir=/etc' '--libexecdir=/usr/lib' '--localstatedir=/var' '--with-x-toolkit=gtk3' '--with-xft' 'CFLAGS=-march=x86-64 -mtune=generic -O2 -pipe -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4' 'LDFLAGS=-Wl,-O1,--sort-common,--as-needed,-z,relro' 'CPPFLAGS=-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2'' Important settings: value of $LANG: en_US.UTF-8 locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix default enable-multibyte-characters: t Major mode: Lisp Interaction Minor modes in effect: tooltip-mode: t mouse-wheel-mode: t tool-bar-mode: t menu-bar-mode: t file-name-shadow-mode: t global-font-lock-mode: t font-lock-mode: t blink-cursor-mode: t auto-composition-mode: t auto-encryption-mode: t auto-compression-mode: t line-number-mode: t transient-mark-mode: t Recent input: M-x r e p o r Recent messages: For information about GNU Emacs and the GNU system, type C-h C-a. Making completion list... Load-path shadows: None found. Features: (shadow sort gnus-util mail-extr emacsbug message format-spec rfc822 mml mml-sec mm-decode mm-bodies mm-encode mail-parse rfc2231 mailabbrev gmm-utils mailheader sendmail rfc2047 rfc2045 ietf-drums mm-util mail-prsvr mail-utils help-mode easymenu time-date tooltip ediff-hook vc-hooks lisp-float-type mwheel x-win x-dnd tool-bar dnd fontset image regexp-opt fringe tabulated-list newcomment lisp-mode register page menu-bar rfn-eshadow timer select scroll-bar mouse jit-lock font-lock syntax facemenu font-core frame cham georgian utf-8-lang misc-lang vietnamese tibetan thai tai-viet lao korean japanese hebrew greek romanian slovak czech european ethiopic indian cyrillic chinese case-table epa-hook jka-cmpr-hook help simple abbrev minibuffer loaddefs button faces cus-face macroexp files text-properties overlay sha1 md5 base64 format env code-pages mule custom widget hashtable-print-readable backquote make-network-process dbusbind dynamic-setting system-font-setting font-render-setting move-toolbar gtk x-toolkit x multi-tty emacs)