RE: Best practices for launching Emacs on Windows 7/8

[Ludwig, Mark]

> From: Jason Rumney, Wednesday, February 20, 2013 7:37 AM
> 
> On Tuesday, 19 February 2013 03:59:43 UTC+8, Ludwig, Mark  wrote:
> 
> > For example, on Windows Vista, I used to be able to make a file
> > association with .TXT files that invoked emacsclient with the
> > --alternate-editor=runemacs option so that if Emacs wasn't
> > running, it would be launched.
> >
> > In Windows 7 and 8, the GUI simply does not allow any options.
> 
> Setting ALTERNATE_EDITOR as an environment variable is an alternative to
> using the command line option.  At least in Windows 7 environment variables
> are still accessible from the Advanced properties of "My Computer".

Thanks, everyone!

When I looked back at what I had on Vista, I found that I was using Emacs 23.1 
and working around a bug in emacsclientw that, if Emacs wasn't running as a 
server, insisted on popping up an error dialog box that had to be manually 
dismissed.  (My workaround was a very complicated command line using NirCmd to 
launch emacsclient but keep it hidden.  Because it was emacsclient, I also 
needed the --no-wait option.)  Now that I'm on Emacs 24.2, I can use 
emacsclientw directly (which does not need --no-wait); combined with setting 
the ALTERNATE_EDITOR environmental variable, it all works perfectly by simply 
associating emacsclientw using the regular file association GUI.  It's very 
nice.

In reviewing the documentation in 
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/emacsclient-Options.html,
 it incorrectly claims:

   '-a command'
   '--alternate-editor=command'
   Specify a command to run if emacsclient fails to contact Emacs. This is 
useful when running emacsclient in a script. 
   As a special exception, if command is the empty string, then emacsclient 
starts Emacs in daemon mode (as emacs --daemon) and then tries connecting 
again. 

Instead with an empty string, emacsclient/emacsclientw 24.2 complain:

   --alternate-editor argument or ALTERNATE_EDITOR variable cannot be
   an empty string

Is this a documentation problem or is the code incorrect?  That is, which way 
should I report the bug?

Side-question: I have (server-start) in my init (which is fairly complicated), 
so I use runemacs and never use emacs --daemon, but I wonder if there's any 
effective difference.  Is there anything really special about emacs --daemon 
that I might be missing by using (server-start) myself?

Cheers,
Mark

P.S. I am not subscribed to gnu.emacs.help, so cannot post there.  Can someone 
else forward this or is there a gateway from help-gnu-emacs?