Calling any text editor for any text file

[Ville Skyttä]

On Sunday 23 September 2007, Jonathan Underwood wrote:
> On 22/09/2007, Ville Skyttä <ville.skytta at iki.fi> wrote:
> > On Saturday 22 September 2007, Marcin Zajączkowski wrote:
> > > Ville Skyttä wrote:
> > >
> > > Does emacs graphical interface (doesn't need a console)?
> >
> > Yes.  It also starts faster than XEmacs and integrates better with the
> > desktop (at least look and feel wise) so I suggest trying it before
> > XEmacs in the script.
>
> Also - if you're starting Emacs, you should consider calling
> emacsclient -a emacs <foo> which uses an existing Emacs if one is
> running with emacsserver running, or starts emacs if not.

The confusing thing about that is that it'll not only reuse a running emacs, 
it'll reuse an existing window too, pushing its current buffer out of view to 
the buffer list (Where did my existing open Emacs and its buffer go?).  And 
if only one window was active, carelessly closing the window will kill all 
the buffers active in it, possibly resulting in data loss.

Granted, maybe people who do activate the server (which needs to be explicitly 
done) are aware of this, but even then I'm not sure if it'd be a good thing 
to do by default.  If emacsclient would open a new frame for each new file, 
the problem would be much less severe IMO.  If the opening is done with a 
shell script, people can use shell aliases to get emacsclient stuff 
transparently done the way they prefer.