Subject: emacsclient obeys Xresources even when launched with -nw

From: Dimitrios Apostolou <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2018 19:49:31 +0200 (CEST)

GNU Emacs 26.1 (build 1, x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.22.30) of 2018-06-26

I have set the Xresource *reverseVideo to true, and as expected emacs 
reverses the colours when launched under X, and does not when launched 
with -nw thus keeping the terminal colour selections.

However emacsclient obeys the Xresources even when launched with -nw. This 
leads to colour reversal in text mode, which is unwanted since the xterm 
has already been configured as desired.

It seems the reason is that emacs-server loads the Xresources and sets 
some internal state that instructs all new emacsclient instances to 
reverse colours, regardless of them being an X client app or not.

A very quick way to reproduce and see the different behaviour of emacs and 
emacsclient is to run the following commands:

emacs -xrm 'emacs*reverseVideo: true' --exec \
      '(progn (setq server-name "reverseVideo_TRUE_server")
              (server-start)
              (insert server-name))' &
emacs -xrm 'emacs*reverseVideo: false' --exec \
      '(progn (setq server-name "reverseVideo_FALSE_server")
              (server-start)
              (insert server-name))' &
sleep 2
xterm -e emacsclient -nw -s reverseVideo_TRUE_server  &
xterm -e emacsclient -nw -s reverseVideo_FALSE_server &

Credits to Javier who posted this script at [1]. Please read the full 
thread for more information on the topic.

[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2018-09/msg00193.html

Thanks,
Dimitris