Re: [tlug] X11 Session Manager Setup

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Daniel A. Ramaley writes:
 > On Monday November 3 2008 20:33, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
 > >It's one of the great marketing failures of the Emacs world that the
 > >server program is named after the project, and the command line client
 > >is named "client".
 > 
 > I use emacs everyday but never knew it had a client and server. Why does 
 > it need that? When i run "emacs" is it actually firing up a server and 
 > then a client?

No.  The main program is the "server".  There is a separate program
called emacsclient in Emacs and gnuclient in XEmacs that allows you to
attach another terminal to a running emacs process, or to run a Lisp
program, or to fire up an X frame on the process.

Recent GNU Emacs (ie, from CVS) actually does have a server mode,
invoked with "emacs --daemon", that doesn't provide a frame at all
until you poke it with emacsclient.  I don't see a real point in that,
myself, but it's kinda cool (like doing "chsh /usr/bin/xemacs", except
that's much cooler).

As for "need", there's no real need.  But sometimes you want to do a
quick Lisp computation, or to edit a file when there is no Emacs frame
visible (including when you're logged in remotely to a workstation
where you left XEmacs running ... as I am, right now), and it's
convenient.