Re: Starting emacs in ediff mode.

[Richard G Riley]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008 18:03:30 +0100
>> From: "Juanma Barranquero" <lekktu@gmail.com>
>> Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
>> 
>> > > >    emacs --eval "(ediff-files \"file_1\" \"file_2\")"
>> 
>> I think Lennart is saying that if file_1 and file_2 are relative,
>
> Really?  It works for me with relative file names (of course, I used
> "-q" as well, so if someone changes directory in their .emacs, that
> could be a problem).
>
>> Emacs does not find them, and if they are absolute, the backslashes in
>> the paths cause problems (at the very least, they must be escaped
>> themselves).
>
> Or use forward slashes; nothing new here.
>
>> > I don't see how is this relevant to the OP's question: if they already
>> > have Emacs running, they could simply invoke Ediff from within that
>> > Emacs session.  And if Emacs is not running, what's the advantage of
>> > using emacsclient?
>> 
>> Lennart's patched emacsclient starts Emacs automatically.
>
> That's fine, but I asked what was the _advantage_ of using
> emacsclient instead of invoking Emacs itself?

The same advantage of ever using emacsclient one would have thought.

Personally I must admit to being surprised that emacsclient doesn't
invoke emacs if there is not an existing emacs running - that one
ommission makes it tricky to set up emacsclient as default viewer/editor
in many cases. One could always turn off that default behaviour for more
advanced use. I've read reasonings as to why it doesn't launch emacs if
not already done, but, well, it just seems quite wrong and I guess why
lennart changed the default in his distribution.