emacs --daemon frozen when started with emacsclient file

Question

This is somewhat of a follow up to Prevent emacsclient from blocking other instances.

I am using emacsclient -a '' -nw --socket-name=$TTY where TTY=$(basename tty). I use emacs in the terminal and this gives a unique daemon for each terminal session.

If I start the daemon by running emacsclient with no arguments, it starts and everything works fine. However, if I start it by running emacsclient file, it locks down. It opens the scratch buffer and then gets frozen. The only way to fix it is to kill -9 the daemon process and to restart it without opening a file.

I am using emacs 24.4 compiled with --without-x with Mac OS X in iTerm 2. You can get the exact build of emacs I am using with conda conda install -c asmeurer emacs.

EDIT

I found after disabling flyspell (commenting out these lines from my .emacs), it fixes it. It still hangs on the scratch buffer for a few seconds, but then goes to the file. I suspect it has something to do with starting the hunspell process.

Answer 1

I have found a reasonable workaround. First, add a script to your PATH with

#!/bin/sh
export TTY=$(basename `tty`)

emacs --daemon="emacs-$TTY"
emacsclient -n -nw --socket-name="emacs-$TTY"
emacsclient -nw --socket-name="emacs-$TTY" "$@"

called emacs-server-start. Then start emacsclient with emacsclient -a 'emacs-server-start' -nw --socket-name=emacs-$TTY (I have e aliased to this in my bash configuration).

You basically are creating a custom "start emacs server" alternate editor for emacsclient -a, since emacsclient -a '' doesn't work. Saving this to a file is necessary because the argument to -a must be a single command (i.e., emacsclient -a 'emacs --daemon' does not work).

The extra emacsclient -n, which causes emacsclient to start and immediately close with no file, is there because otherwise emacs will sometimes still freeze at startup.