On 2019-09-15 06:34, Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote: > , I guess we should just revert the patch -- I don't see any obvious > way to determine whether --alternate-editor is Emacs (which will then > understand the rest of the parameters) or something else (which will > then not). So leaving it the way it was is best. I'm not sure what the best solution is here, it's just I had something that worked and now I can't get emacs27 to work usefully in the same way. It should be possible to run the code in the client or a new instance, but I didn't manage to get this working. CODE='(progn (message "HELLO WOLD"))' emacsclient --eval "$CODE" --alternate-editor "emacs --eval '$CODE'" Instead of starting a new emacs and printing HELLO WOLD, it reports: emacsclient: error executing alternate editor "emacs --eval '(progn (message "HELLO WORLD"))'"