Re: Is it possible to use emacsclient as the Gnome system editor?

[Lennart Borgman]

Steinar Bang wrote:
> Platform: Intel Pentium M, Ubuntu Dapper,
>           Gnome desktop (2.14.3-0ubuntu1)
>           emacs21 21.4a-3ubuntu2
>
> I'm trying to use emacsclient, instead of gedit, as the default Gnome
> text editor.
>
> Googling found me this howto:
>         http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=299086
>
> But this requires that there is a .desktop entry for the replacement
> editor.  On my system there is an emacs21.desktop.  But using that
> would fire up a new emacs for each file opened, and that's not what I
> want. 
>
> So what I wonder is: is it possible to create an emacsclient.desktop
> entry?  Or is desktop entry for emacsclient a meaningless concept?
>
> Basically: Is it possible to use emacsclient as the Gnome system
> editor? 


Basically: yes. However with the current emacsclient you have to start 
emacs first. There has currently been a discussion on the emacs devel 
list where I have tried to argue that in Emacs 22 emacsclient should be 
able to automatically start emacs when needed. I think most people there 
would agree it is a good (but for many not very important) thing. 
However it does not seem that it will make it into Emacs 22.

I have this working on MS Windows at the moment, but I am not sure the 
code is working on GNU/Linux. Testers are welcome.