Subject: bug#7741: 23.2.91; Please allow emacs to run emacsclient

From: Reuben Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Jul 2011 18:44:38 +0100

On 4 July 2011 18:32, Juanma Barranquero <[email-masked]> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 18:23, Reuben Thomas <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
>> it seems worth
>> pursuing making things simpler. Here, I'm after a solution that means
>> that one can set EDITOR=emacs, and it will just DTRT, i.e. start Emacs
>> if not already started, or use emacsclient otherwise.
>
> Simpler than using emacsclient -a "" or the emacs daemon?

Exactly.

> But what you're talking aboutis  saving a few keystrokes
> once...

Exactly.

> It is
> possible to use Emacs out of the box, but even users without time or
> expertise will have to set up more than that to make effective use of
> Emacs, I think.

Exactly, that is the problem.

> Doesn't seem worth the trouble to me, but that's just MHO.

It is certainly worth the trouble. Emacs is an extremely powerful
editor with an amazing wealth of functionality. In recent years there
has been some excellent work on making more of this work out of the
box, but far too much is still left untapped by most users. I am a
constant and moderately advanced user of Emacs, but there are many
exciting and potentially useful features I have never even tried
simply because I have not the time to configure them. Working out how
to activate powerful new features out of the box without either
confusing new users or annoying existing users is often tricky, but
once a feature has been introduced and found useful, it's pretty much
an essential step in order to make it widely available.

As an example, look how many users still complain of Emacs's "lack" of
features found in other IDEs. Actually, many of these features are
available in Emacs, but they take time to set up. This means that many
users don't get to see them, and, just as important, the packages
themselves don't get the feedback or polish they deserve. One example
is CEDET, whose code comprehension and refactoring capabilities I've
tried to use more than once, but have always come up against minor
bugs which made it unusable for me. Another is nXhtml, which I use
despite some annoying minor bugs (fortunately for my use they are
mostly cosmetic), thanks to significant one-to-one help from the
author.

It would be unfair of me not to point out that Emacs is much better in
this regard than it was a few years ago (I remember when even syntax
coloring was off by default!), but it still suffers from
configurationitis worse than any other program I use regularly, and
unfortunately there is still a mentality of "that can be fixed by
adding an option". There are far too many options!

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