On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 10:57 AM, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

Silently dropping arguments is not very polite, so I'm not really happy with your solution.

I think as long as it is documented that the alternate_editor is not passed the arguments intended for Emacs, that behavior is not terrible.

I think the "right" behavior would be to call the alternate editor while preserving most arguments; IOW the right fix
in this case would be to add a "--eval" argument, so that your alternate_editor can decide whether to drop args when it gets an "--eval" or to prepend all other args with a "--eval=" (or do whatever else it fancies).

On a practical level, I doubt the alternate_editor is going to be prepared to deal with Emacs flags, so that's not terribly useful.

Maybe the best solution would be to have something like "--alternate-editor-arguments" so that the user can specifically provide the arguments to use with the alternate editor?