Re: emacs daemon on win32?

[David De La Harpe Golden]

Juanma Barranquero wrote:

> The cool thing would be to have a Windows Emacs server start as a
> systray app. I'd love for Emacs not to use space in the taskbar, just
> in the tray, until I bring it forward with emacsclient. David De La
> Harpe Golden proposed as much back in August (though he was talking
> about GNU/Linux, I think).

I was, or rather freedesktop.org compliant desktops in general that 
follow the relevant systray spec*, but only because that's the 
environment I personally know or care about, similar functionality on 
other platforms with GUI conventions for such things is presumably 
equally desirable.

While I believe the spec is straightforward, I personally won't have 
time to look implementing it in the next few days anyway (tax filing 
deadline is Hallowe'en in Ireland, appropriately enough!), so below find 
my (trivial) design notes.

*
http://standards.freedesktop.org/systemtray-spec/systemtray-spec-latest.html


I imagined an emacs icon in the systray, clicking left button just 
opening a new frame, right button bringing up a small menu with 
something like
Open File...                                            [1]
New Frame
New Frame on Display...                                 [2]
Start Emacs Server [/ Stop Emacs Server]                [3]
Settings...                                             [4]
Quit Emacs                                              [5]

I really don't think you'd want more than that on the menu, keep it simple.

Note that the systray support could also be used for popup balloon 
message notifications too, in the manner described in *, e.g. new mail 
notifications for intra-emacs mail/news clients. (biff being long-dead 
for all practical purposes)

[1] - Jumping straight to open file dialog, opening in new frame.
(or of course new frame and show file list if you've turned the 
dire-on-gtk/gnome system GUI file dialog off)

[2] Not sure about this one, might be considered advanced functionality.

[3] I think for the present people will want to be able to restart the 
emacsclient server from the menu (since in my experience it's fairly 
easy to accidentally nuke the socket with another emacs or whatever, and 
then the only practical option is to restart it).   I guess a tooltip 
should say something like "when the server is running, you can use 
emacsclient from the command line to edit files in this emacs session". 
 The started/stopped state should probably be persistent across sessions
(i.e. whether emacs starts the server when emacs is started upon login).

[4] jumping straight to a new frame opened on the customize toplevel I 
guess.

[5] This should probably give a modified close dialog asking if you want 
emacs restarted upon next login or not, most systray apps do AFAIK even 
if it's strictly kinda redundant (since one could just not quit it or
restart it before logout if you wanted the session to save the fact it's 
there...)