Re: Pretest

[Lennart Borgman]

David Kastrup wrote:
> Lennart Borgman <address@hidden> writes:
> > What is missing is something that allows you to just use
> >
> >    emacsclient -n myfile
> >
> > without doing any setup whatever, without having to start Emacs
> > before. It should in my opinion work right out of the box.
>
> Are there really typical use cases which require -n?  If so, is there
> a need for them to wait for --alternate-editor?


Sorry, I did not mean that

   emacsclient myfile

is not equally important. There are of course many typical use cases 
both with and without -n.


> > The reason? The threshold is already high to start to use Emacs. For
> > new users it is very important to be able to start immediately right
> > after installing Emacs. Otherwise a lot of potential user might
> > never start using Emacs.
>
> What is the problem with the invocation I gave?  The _technical_
> problem?  If a shorthand option for that invocation would be
> desirable, it would be possible to implement this in about three lines
> of code, so why is something different required?


Are you saying that you could implement this in a general way so that a 
new user right after installation can just type something like

   emacsclient myfile
or
   emacsclient -n myfile

in just three lines of code? I did actually not add many lines to do 
this (most was restructuring of existing code), but I added quite a bit 
more than tree lines.


> > The possibility to do something like the line you propose should still
> > be there, but with my patch you should be able to just use
> >
> >    emacsclient --alternative-editor="whateveryoulike" myfile
> >
> > instead.
>
> Why would that not work with the existing code?  It did work up to
> now, didn't it?

I think Juanma gave you a reason before. It seems impossible to 
implement the wait this way. (And I am sure you can see the details 
yourself.)