How do I specify a daemon to start with alternate emacs version with emacsclient

Question

I have found this script from here

#!/usr/bin/env zsh
# Checks if there's a frame open
emacsclient -n -e “(if (> (length (frame-list)) 1) ‘t)” 2> /dev/null | grep t &> /dev/null
if [ “$?” -eq “1” ]; then
 emacsclient -a ‘’ -nqc “$@” &> /dev/null
else
 emacsclient -nq “$@” &> /dev/null
fi

that seems nice for starting the daemon with -a '' only if there is not a server up. However at my work, our emacs and emacsclient intended to be used are prefixed with abc, so we have abc_emacs and abc_emacsclient. There are older Emacs in the system with the regular names.

So how do I modify a command like emacsclient -a '' -nqc somearg so that it starts the server in the case of no server being up with abc_emacs instead of emacs?

Answer 1

The option -a specifies the editor that should be started if there is no emacs server started yet (the so-called "alternate editor). If the empty string is passed, as in the script above, emacs --daemon is run and emacsclient tries to connect to it (see man emacsclient or M-: (info "(emacs) emacsclient Options") within emacs). Unfortunately, in your case, emacs --daemon obviously runs the wrong Emacs. Hence, we'd like to specify an alternate editor that will start abc_emacs --daemon and then connect to it. I think the easiest method is to simply create a script that will do that for us.

#!/bin/bash

abc_emacs --daemon
emacsclient "$@"

Call it, say, abc_emacs_helper (hopefully that won't collide with any existing programs), make it executable and place it somewhere in your $PATH. Then you can replace emacsclient -a '' with emacsclient -a 'abc_emacs_helper').