On Jan 27, 2008 2:17 PM, Richard G Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com> wrote:
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.
Of course you can run emacsclient so it will start Emacs if it is not
running; that's what the --alternate-editor option is for. The trick,
of course, is that --alternate-editor doesn't run Emacs as a server
connected to the emacsclient instance that started it. That does not
preclude using it as default viewer/editor in all cases, just the ones
where it is automatically run from a tool that expects it to be done
when emacsclient returns (for example, in many VCS when emacsclient is
used as the editor for the commit logs).
I've read reasonings as to why it doesn't launch emacs if
not already done, but, well, it just seems quite wrong
I haven't read (in the emacs-devel list) reasonings as to why it
*shouldn't* do it, just as to why it is not yet implemented.