Calling any text editor for any text file

[Jonathan Underwood]

On 23/09/2007, Ville Skyttä <ville.skytta at iki.fi> wrote:
> 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.

Yes, good points, and in light of the last point, i agree.