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I'm looking to set up an emacs server such that the files specified by emacsclients are relative to the emacsclients' filesystem and not the server's filesystem. For instance, if I set up an emacs server on a machine "darkstar" and I connect to this server through an emacsclient on "brightstar" with the command 

emacsclient -nw '~/fantastic'

The emacs server will attempt to edit the file ~/fantastic on darkstar and not on brightstar. Id like the reverse of this. I'm open to all sorts of zany suggestions.

*Background note: I want an emacs process that tracks all the buffers I open on various machines, keeps track of my color settings, bindings, etc. I want all of this available and replicated on any arbitrary machine with emacs. The emacs server seems to do just this but without the ability to edit client's local files!

Luke Girvin
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fthinker
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  • Is this more of a http://serverfault.com/ question? – TJ Ellis Jan 26 '12 at 18:33
  • Pretty sure this can't be done the way you describe - for this to work, you'll _somehow_ have to mount _brightstar's_ file system on darkstar, change the relative home paths (i.e. `~`).. it's not going to be pretty. – Marvin Pinto Jan 26 '12 at 18:36
  • @TJEllis - I don't think so, I think this question definitely falls into the category 'software tools commonly used by programmers'. – Luke Girvin Jan 26 '12 at 22:10
  • @fthinker, how are you using a local emacsclient to connect to a remote emacs daemon? – jrm Jan 26 '12 at 22:56
  • @jrm you can start the server up in tcp mode instead of using unix sockets. If you are using windows it starts up in tcp mode only. see the `--server-file=server-file` option @ [http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/emacsclient-Options.html] – fthinker Jan 27 '12 at 05:49

2 Answers2

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Does the remote machine (the one running Emacs) have mounted the filesystem of the local machine? If so, you could issue something like:

 emacsclient --eval ´(my-open-file "~/fantastic" "my-local-machine")´

You could then write the function my-open-file that could, for example, open the file //mounts/my-local-machine/home/YOUR-ACCOUNT/fantastic (assuming this is the mount point).

It will require some elisp-hacking and some script hacking (using, for example, Ruby) to build up the emacsclient command-line.

Lindydancer
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You should be able to set to set up a shell function which uses tramp, like

edit-local() {
    emacsclient -e "(find-file (expand-file-name \"$1\" \"/ssh:$USER@$(hostname):$PWD\"))"
}

Of course you may have to change the tramp protocol to whatever you have setup.

Ivan Andrus
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  • I'm going to accept this answer because I believe it is the closest solution to what I am trying to accomplish. Its either 1) Shared mounts (ugly :) 2) ssh callback (better) 3) Hack the lisp code so that the opened buffer is filled with the local text and writing it out sends it back to the client to be saved. Certainly not as easy as 2) – fthinker Jan 27 '12 at 05:45
  • Heh, what you have described is pretty much identical to _How can I use tramp to connect to a remote Emacs session?_ @ (http://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/#Remote-processes) – fthinker Jan 27 '12 at 16:45