bug#31709: 27.0.50; Wishlist: Perhaps Emacs should load a file when getting a particular signal?

[Phil Sainty]

On 2018-06-06 01:31, Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:
> What I'm proposing here is that Emacs should have this functionality
> by default, so that anybody can use it when they discover that they
> need it.

I think that's a nice idea, personally.  I do run a server as
standard, but I won't clobber an existing server, and I've been
bitten by this issue on occasions when I had multiple emacs instances
running and wanted to access a non-server instance from elsewhere.

By default [sigusr1] and [sigusr2] are bound to 'ignore in
special-event-map, so I don't see why one (or even both) of them
couldn't instead be bound by default to a function which checks to see
whether the file "~/.emacs.d/sigusr1.el" (or 2) exists and, if so,
loads it.

By default that function still wouldn't do very much unless anyone
happens to have such a file existing already, so it doesn't seem like
a totally crazy replacement change from 'ignore (especially if these
signals are only ever sent by users); but people could then create
the file at the time they need it.


-Phil