Re: GNU Emacs now runs in foreground

From: Jean Louis <bugs_at_gnu.support>
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2016 20:28:46 +0300

On Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 12:05:31PM -0500, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Dec 2016 11:18:29 +0300
> Jean Louis <bugs_at_gnu.support> wrote:
>
> > The GNU Emacs now has got a new option:
> >
> > emacs --new-daemon=NAME
> >
> > that is running emacs daemon in foreground, obviously someone reacted
> > since last time I wrote to the emacs mailing list. It is in the
> > development version or git.
>
> OK, I'll byte.
>
> I thought emacs was an editor that a human runs in the foreground to
> edit files, so my reaction to this was "of course it runs in the
> foreground!"
>
> What am I missing?

You are right, it is hard to figure out the context. That is for s6
services, I am invoking editor as daemon, so that it may be accessed
later by need.

Buffers remain in memory, and so the IRC, Jabber chat, various
documents from which I yank parts of texts into emails, registers, the
programming languages are invoked within the editor, and shells and
other tools. Invoking single editor each time is a bit slower, than
invoking it as client that accesses the daemon. And that way, all the
goodies would be lost by each new invocation. Some people have
multiple buffers over multiple days.

Just before some time, emacs --daemon, would go into background, so it
was not feasible to control it with s6 scripts. Now developers changed
it, and it is possible to invoke multiple instances by name, and still
keep the daemon in foreground. In that mode there is no interface to
editor. Clients that access the editor, show the interface.

Jean
Received on Thu Dec 01 2016 - 17:28:46 UTC