Re: Some developement questions

[hw]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: hw <address@hidden>
>> Cc: address@hidden,  address@hidden,  address@hidden,  address@hidden
>> Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2018 22:52:40 +0200
>> 
>> The whole section about the --tramp-prefix= option confused me.
>
> It has an example, which should have cleared up things.  However, I'm
> not yet convinced that option is for your use case, because I don't
> yet understand your use case well enough.

I'm not sure, either.

>> I have menu and toolbar disabled ...
>
> Unless you loathe the mouse, C-mouse-3 will pop up the same menu as
> the one that would have been available from the menu bar.

I usually use (toggle-menu-bar-mode-from-frame).  In this case, I simply
didn't think of turning on the menu, or of using it.

>> I ended up getting stuck in the help documentation of info and
>> actually had to kill the buffer to be able to start over because I
>> couldn't get anywhere else from there.
>
> Typing 'q' (for "quit") would have been a better and easier way out.
> But there's nothing wrong with killing the Info buffer, either.

I tried that.  When you run (info) again, you're back at the same help
page.  'q' does not actually quit such buffers.

>> >> And what file is there to access when I want an X frame?
>> >
>> > When you invoke emacsclient, you usually ask it to visit a file,
>> > right?
>> 
>> Wrong; the files are usually already loaded, either because Emacs keeps
>> running on the server, or because desktop-mode has already restored
>> them.
>
> That's irrelevant, because eventually you'd want to access files.
> That's what Emacs is for, right?

Sure, and it may not be irrelevant.  Visiting a file is different from
not visiting one.

>> I'd like to use the Emacs server that runs remotely on the server from
>> my workstation with an emacsclient running locally on the workstation
>> directly without X11 forwarding via ssh for the frames, and I'd like to
>> be able to also use 'emacsclient -nw' on the workstation, using the
>> emacs server on the server.
>
> Is this a single use case or two separate ones?

I guess it is two variants of the same case: using the terminal in one
and an X frame in the other variant.  It would be the same case because
in any case, I'm trying to use emacsclient with a remote Emacs server.

> Assuming they are separate: for the first one, is using the -dDISPLAY
> option (without any client) what you want?  And for the second, did
> you try using server-use-tcp?

I tried both.  Without the -d option, emacs and emacsclient both seem to
ignore the DISPLAY variable, and only with -d, they try to use the
display they should use.

>> I understand that the Emacs server can not open the virtual terminal
>> when using 'emacsclient -nw' because from its perspective, that is a
>> remote file.
>
> I'm afraid I don't understand why you need to run "emacsclient -nw" on
> another machine.  Why not remotely login and run emacsclient there?

That's because I want to use emacsclient with a remote Emacs server and
because I would have to log in to run emacsclient on the server.  I
wouldn't be able to use Emacs in an X frame, either, unless I'd switch
the monitor over to the server and run an X server there.  If I wanted
to do that, I'd need to put a dedicated graphics card into the server to
get a decent picture, and I don't want to do that because then the
server would consume more electricity (about 1.5 times as much).  I also
would have to use a keyboard that is connected to the server and end up
with two keyboards on my desk, which doesn't fit very well.

Why would I want to run the emacsclient on the same machine as the Emacs
server?  I tried that, and the only advantage was that I could use it to
visit files in an already running Emacs session from the command line.
Other than that, there were no advantages but disadvantages.