bug#646: emacsclient with no args to behave like -a

[Jim Porter]

On 8/26/2021 8:31 PM, Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:
> "J. Pablo "Fernández\"" <pupeno@pupeno.com> writes:
>
> > It would be nice if emacsclient, when called with no arguments, would
> > just run the alternate editor. I've configured emacs as my alternate
> > editor so emacsclient for me is basically a "open this in an existing
> > emacs or run one otherwise", the only problem for that to work
> > completely is having it working with no arguments.
>
> (I'm going through old bug reports that unfortunately weren't
> resolved at the time.)
>
> It seems like this has been fixed in the 13 years since it was reported.
>
> I did:
>
> larsi@elva:~/src/emacs/trunk$ export ALTERNATE_EDITOR=nano
> larsi@elva:~/src/emacs/trunk$ ./lib-src/emacsclient /tmp/foo
>
> and that opened nano.

It sounds to me like the "args" in question would be "/tmp/foo" in this 
case. On Emacs 27.2 and 28.0.50, I see:

  $ export ALTERNATE_EDITOR=nano
  $ lib-src/emacsclient
  lib-src/emacsclient: file name or argument required
  Try 'lib-src/emacsclient --help' for more information

From my reading, this is the original reporter's preferred behavior:

  1) If Emacs is not currently running
     a) `emacsclient file.txt' starts Emacs and opens file.txt
     b) `emacsclient' starts Emacs (as though running `emacs')
  2) If Emacs is currently running
     a) `emacsclient file.txt' opens file.txt in the existing Emacs session
     b) `emacsclient' brings some frame in the existing Emacs session 
to the foreground