Subject: bug#50849: 28.0.50; Proposal for Emacs daemon to signal when being busy

From: Visuwesh <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Sep 2022 19:24:05 +0530

[வெள்ளி செப்டம்பர் 02, 2022] Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:

> But I'm slightly leery about having a default timeout at all -- I can
> imagine that there are people using emacsclient as an RPC thing to
> control an Emacs automatically, and in that case, any timeout would be
> wrong: It's more important to have a reliable mechanism than anything
> else.  (And in that scenario, the Emacs daemon might well be busy for a
> long time, if you have a script that just feeds commands to the
> daemon...)
>
> But on the other hand, it's nice to give the user some more feedback
> there than just hanging.
>
> Hm...
>
> Might it make sense to use the timeout to just output a message on
> stdout saying "Unable to contact the server; use `C-c' to break" or
> something?  Instead of just exiting/erroring out?
>
> Anybody have opinions here?

Can we not add a new flag like "--no-timeout" for the people who expect
emacsclient to never time out?  I have a shell script that spawns an
Emacs frame with a new M-x shell buffer every time I call it and it
serves me really well but I have one minor annoyance: there is no way to
fallback to a (boring) terminal emulator if Emacs is busy.
When Emacs is busy and nothing shows up on my screen, I am always
surprised then remember that I let Emacs do something CPU hungry and
pull up dmenu to spawn a st window.