GNU bug report logs - #646
emacsclient with no args to behave like -a

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Package: emacs;

Reported by: "J. Pablo Fernández" <pupeno <at> pupeno.com>

Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2008 10:20:03 UTC

Severity: wishlist

Done: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi <at> gnus.org>

Bug is archived. No further changes may be made.

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Message #45 received at 646 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Jim Porter <jporterbugs <at> gmail.com>
To: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi <at> gnus.org>,
 J. Pablo Fernández\ <pupeno <at> pupeno.com>
Cc: 646 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#646: emacsclient with no args to behave like -a
Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2021 21:00:12 -0700

On 8/26/2021 8:31 PM, Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:
> "J. Pablo "Fernández\"" <pupeno <at> pupeno.com> writes:
> 
>> It would be nice if emacsclient, when called with no arguments, would
>> just run the alternate editor. I've configured emacs as my alternate
>> editor so emacsclient for me is basically a "open this in an existing
>> emacs or run one otherwise", the only problem for that to work
>> completely is having it working with no arguments.
> 
> (I'm going through old bug reports that unfortunately weren't
> resolved at the time.)
> 
> It seems like this has been fixed in the 13 years since it was reported.
> 
> I did:
> 
> larsi <at> elva:~/src/emacs/trunk$ export ALTERNATE_EDITOR=nano
> larsi <at> elva:~/src/emacs/trunk$ ./lib-src/emacsclient /tmp/foo
> 
> and that opened nano.

It sounds to me like the "args" in question would be "/tmp/foo" in this 
case. On Emacs 27.2 and 28.0.50, I see:

  $ export ALTERNATE_EDITOR=nano
  $ lib-src/emacsclient
  lib-src/emacsclient: file name or argument required
  Try 'lib-src/emacsclient --help' for more information

From my reading, this is the original reporter's preferred behavior:

  1) If Emacs is not currently running
     a) `emacsclient file.txt' starts Emacs and opens file.txt
     b) `emacsclient' starts Emacs (as though running `emacs')
  2) If Emacs is currently running
     a) `emacsclient file.txt' opens file.txt in the existing Emacs session
     b) `emacsclient' brings some frame in the existing Emacs session 
to the foreground
This bug report was last modified 3 years and 326 days ago.

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