Problem with jrnl and emacsclient at emacs server start

[Niols]

Hi,

Firstly I really like this command line tool, thanks a lot for it.

I still have a little problem with editing it in editor. My editor is emacs, and I use it in server mode. My $EDITOR var is the following:

emacsclient -nw -a ""

• emacsclient is a little part of emacs that just tries to connect to the emacs server
• -nw means no-window (because I like to use emacs in terminal and not in graphic mode)
• -a "" means that there's no alternate editor. This means that if emacs server isn't found, instead of using an alternate editor, emacs client tries to launch it.

This emacs installation is working pretty well, and I'm using it since months. With jrnl however, I encounter a little problem:

If emacs server has not been started, and if I write jrnl or jrnl --edit, I get the following:

[niols@tosh ~]$ jrnl 
emacsclient: can't find socket; have you started the server?
To start the server in Emacs, type "M-x server-start".
emacsclient: error executing alternate editor """"
[Nothing saved to file]
2015-07-08 19:42 test

instead of the usual:

[niols@tosh ~]$ emacs 
emacsclient: can't find socket; have you started the server?
To start the server in Emacs, type "M-x server-start".

Warning: due to a long standing Gtk+ bug
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85715
Emacs might crash when run in daemon mode and the X11 connection is unexpectedly lost.
Using an Emacs configured with --with-x-toolkit=lucid does not have this problem.
Loading time...
Loading time...done
Loading paren...
Loading paren...done
Starting Emacs daemon.
Emacs daemon should have started, trying to connect again

So there must be something in the way you're calling the editor that emacs doesn't like. There's no problem when the emacs server has already been started.

This is not a prioritary bug, considering how few people this must concern and how easy it is to fix it (just start emacs server…). I'm using emacs 24.5, python 3.4.3 on archlinux.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[wren]

I wonder if this is related to #581. @Niols, I assume you were using v1.9.8 for this bug report. Is that correct? Can you paste your config in here for a deeper look, please?

[gregorybodnar]

I've been having a bit of a look at #435 , which attempts to address #581 . shlex.split is consuming the quotes in both cases.

>>> import shlex
>>> invocation = 'emacsclient -nw -a ""'
>>> shlex.split(invocation)
['emacsclient', '-nw', '-a', '']

The double quotes that specify the alternate are getting stripped. There's an empty string left in the sequence that's passed to subprocess.call, but I don't have a firm grasp of what might be happening between the construction and the execution of the command when operating on a sequence. If it's being converted to a string, you'd get something like this:

>>> ' '.join(shlex.split(invocation))
'emacsclient -nw -a '

I expect that any respectable shell would fail to pass an empty argument after the -a.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[wren]

The way we parse the editor config needs some work. I think this issue is the same as #581, so I'm closing as duplicate for now. Feel free to reopen if the other issue doesn't solve it.

[lock]

This thread has been automatically locked since there has not been any recent activity after it was closed. Please open a new issue for related bugs.