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Is there a way to designate a specific frame in which files opened with emacsclient will appear?

I have one monitor that is dedicated to a fullscreen Emacs frame. I do most of my editing in that monitor, but from time to time I will open a second frame on another monitor temporarily. I want to ensure that every time I open a file using emacsclient, it gets sent to my fullscreen frame and doesn't end up on any other frames that might be open.

Edit:

The ideal workflow would be that my initial emacs frame gets tagged as the recipient of all emacsclient requests, and the rest is automatic. I always use the initial frame as my primary emacs frame, and other frames come and go as needed.

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  • Which operating system are you running? Answers may vary if your window system is X, Windows, Mac OS. – purple_arrows Oct 22 '14 at 5:01
  • @purple_arrows Typically I am on Linux, but I also use Emacs on Mac and Windows. Also, I would like to be able to send the file to a specific frame if possible, not just a specific display. – nispio Oct 22 '14 at 15:05
  • It'll take me a while to get back to an answer that (fingers crossed) works cross platforms. server-select-display does the work of selecting the frame to use, and unfortunately it doesn't offer any hooks to customize. – purple_arrows Oct 22 '14 at 18:49
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If your windowing system is X and your monitors are configured as separate screens, you can pass the appropriate DISPLAY value (e.g. :0.0 or :0.1) to emacsclient with the -d option. That's kind of a big "if".

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  • I am using X, and -d :0.0 works fine, but for some reason -d :0.1 gives an error: Display :0.1 can't be opened. – nispio Oct 22 '14 at 15:01
  • Your monitors may be set up as one big screen, as opposed to two separate screens. You can tell if you can drag an (X) window a/k/a (Emacs) frame from one monitor to the other - if that's the case, then this solution won't work for you. – purple_arrows Oct 22 '14 at 18:42
  • You are right. This won't work for me, because my monitors are configured as a single display. – nispio Oct 22 '14 at 20:58
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I have some success with the following command:

emacsclient --eval "(select-frame (car (frames-on-display-list)))"; sleep 1s; emacsclient -n file.txt

The lisp code selects the first frame. To select the second one you should replace car with cadr. But I have not found a way to know which frame is the first ;)

Bests,

Jacek

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  • The sleep shouldn't be neccesary, because emacsclient only returns when eval is done. – Bart Louwers Jan 14 '17 at 12:27

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