Re: TODO

[Stefan Monnier]

>> Please let me know if anyone is already working on one of these tasks.
>> 
>> I can't answer your question but this entry is really
>> interesting. So if you need to "orient" your choice, I'd vote for
>> this :)
>> 
>> ** Make "emacs --daemon" start emacs without showing any frame.
>> Use emacsclient later to open frames.
>> 
>> This idea would be excellent to have. I am using a hack to mimic
>> such behaviour based on GNU screen (I have a GNU Emacs launched
>> through a screen session that acts as a server).

> This could be implemented easily by DBus, because it supports starting
> services on request. To give an impression how it could work (hacked
> on my Ubuntu machine, paths needed to be adapted):

You're talking about something different.  You're talking about
auto-starting Emacs (in daemon mode) on demand.  This can already be
done by a few changes to emacsclient.c (to make it run "emacs -f
server-mode" if the server is not running already).

What the above TODO item is talking about is the question of how to
start Emacs without showing any frame.  Most of the code is there
already: if you look in startup.el you'll see that Emacs starts with
an "initial-terminal" which is basically a pseudo terminal with
a pseudo frame which corresponds to stdin/stdout and at some later point
a real terminal (with a real frame) is created either on the current tty
or on the current GUI display.  When running in batch mode, we only run
with this initial-terminal.

Maybe all we need is something like "emacs --batch -f server-mode -f
top-level".  But I expect that this will uncover all kinds of funny
problems.


        Stefan