On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 9:01 AM, Kapil Hari Paranjape <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Sep 2009, Roshan Mathews wrote:
>> The issue does seem to be, as Kapil Paranjape pointed out,
>> that vi has it's stdin set to /dev/null which it doesn't like.
>
> It is not just "vi" the same happens to "emacs -nw" and "nano" which is
> why the latter two exit. However, (like many unix commands) "vi"
> assumes that you "know what you are doing" and starts up anyway,
> whereas "emacs" and "nano" just quit since they "know what you mean".
>
You're right, my sentence wasn't accurate.  It's xargs which sets
stdin to /dev/null so it happens in all cases.  I don't know how fair
the characterization of emacs and nano is, but emacs didn't originate
in a UNIX world but then the most popular emacsen have been primarily
UNIX-based for decades.  Whether it's better to quit without screwing
things up, or it's better to screw things up is a matter of taste I
guess.

> Ideally, if one wants to use this method then a more appropriate
> choice of command is "emacs-client" or whatever it is called
> nowadays. This prevents yet another instance of emacs from being
> started if one is already running.
>
That is the way you do it with emacs, you start emacs and open your
files with it, not open emacs with filenames on the command line.

Roshan
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