[COFF] [TUHS] Re: Not really Emacs wars (was: foreground/background vs. Windowing)

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 02:03:38PM +1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> > With multiple terminals, I can have multiple editors with different
> > contexts. With the GUI, it all gets dumped together.
> 
> Not in my experience (GNU Emacs 29.4 (build 1,
> amd64-portbld-freebsd13.3, GTK+ Version 3.24.43, cairo version
> 1.17.4).  I have four displays on my server 0, and also 4 instances of
> Emacs: one on :0.1 and three on :0.2.

Yeah, it doesn't work that way for me using GNU emacs on Debian
either.

Many decades ago I did force the behaviour that you describe; it
involved setting EDITOR to emacsclient, and then running
(server-start) in my ~/.emacs.el.  This was a feature back when I was
running emacs on BSD 4.3 with a Vaxstation II/RC with 2 MiB of memory
(Digital had put epoxy into the backplane so you couldn't add more
memory to their memory-starved inexpensive model), but now that I buy
my own desktops with 64 GiB of memory, I really don't care that emacs
is "eight megabytes and constantly swapping" (well, not swapping; I
don't configure swap any more :-) and emacsclient is more annoying
than it's worth.

     	     		    	 	       - Ted