RE: automatic selection of emacsclient/emacs?

[Drew Adams]

    I ask what the benefit of running emacs as a
    client (opposed to the "usual" way) would be?

Two possible benefits:

1. Consider using Emacs from some other application, as the editor for a
text field, for example. A single Emacs process (perhaps on a different
machine) can serve multiple users, and the time to start Emacs up and load
appropriate libraries for the external application is avoided for each user.
The users need not be familiar with setting up Emacs etc.; things are set up
for them.

2. You have a running Emacs session. You double-click a file in Windows
Explorer (or do the equivalent in another OS/GUI). Instead of starting a new
Emacs session and opening the file in that new session, your existing
session is used. Depending on your session initialization, this can 1) save
startup time and 2) let you use existing session-state info when
manipulating the open file.