[COFF] GUIs: There can only be one (was: Not really Emacs wars ...)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

[Removing TUHS again]

On Monday, 21 July 2025 at  7:52:32 -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> 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.

The way I describe, or the way Warner describes?

> 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.

That's a painful way to work around the issue.  Nothing against
emacslient; I'm using it to write this message.  But it's not
necessary.  I didn't have any problems with Emacs in my Linux days.

> 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 :-)

Eight megabytes?  Nowadays that fits into L2 cache :-)

But why do we have this disconnect?  My guess is our different
interpretation and use of "GUI".  I assume that most of us are using
X, though presumably some (you?) might be using Wayland.  There's
nothing in X (nor, I think, in Wayland) that precludes running
multiple instances of the same program.  But programs like firefox
refuse to do so, connecting to instances already running, even if
they're on different displays, or even on different machines.  Emacs,
like most programs, doesn't do that.

So could your window manager (GNOME?) be to blame?  How do you start
Emacs?  I do it via a window manager (fvwm3) that just runs the
program.  Could it be that your window manager tries to be cleverer?

Greg
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