Re: Pretest

[David Kastrup]

Lennart Borgman <address@hidden> writes:

> David Kastrup wrote:
>> "Juanma Barranquero" <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> On 11/19/06, Nick Roberts <address@hidden> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I'm not telling people what to do, or demanding anything.  I'm just
>>>> saying that I don't it is appropriate to delay things for further
>>>> improvements to emacsclient on Windows.  If you're going to sum up,
>>>> at least do it accurately.
>>> Lennart is *proposing* changes that would allow emacsclient to
>>> automatically start Emacs if it is not running already.
>>
>> Could anybody summarize what is missing in order to make
>>
>> emacsclient --alternate-editor "emacs --eval '(server-start)'"
>>
>> work for this purpose?  That seems simple enough, but I could be
>> likely missing some part of the picture.
>
>
> Perhaps I could answer ;-)
>
> What is missing is something that allows you to just use
>
>    emacsclient -n myfile
>
> without doing any setup whatever, without having to start Emacs
> before. It should in my opinion work right out of the box.

Are there really typical use cases which require -n?  If so, is there
a need for them to wait for --alternate-editor?

> The reason? The threshold is already high to start to use Emacs. For
> new users it is very important to be able to start immediately right
> after installing Emacs. Otherwise a lot of potential user might
> never start using Emacs.

What is the problem with the invocation I gave?  The _technical_
problem?  If a shorthand option for that invocation would be
desirable, it would be possible to implement this in about three lines
of code, so why is something different required?

> The possibility to do something like the line you propose should still
> be there, but with my patch you should be able to just use
>
>    emacsclient --alternative-editor="whateveryoulike" myfile
>
> instead.

Why would that not work with the existing code?  It did work up to
now, didn't it?

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum