I use emacs in daemon mode and I also have an initial-buffer-choice
variable set. Sometimes emacs will crash when I am editing the file
that I use for initial-buffer-choice. In this case, when I start
emacs with --daemon, it will hang with the message:
"todo.org has auto save data; consider M-x recover-this-file"
Since I mostly start the daemon from an init script, I can't confirm or deny this dialog, so the daemon hangs forever. How can I bypass the notification of auto-save data in this case? I don't mind losing the auto save data if necessary.
Here was my attempt to do it:
(defadvice command-line
(around my-command-line-advice)
"Be non-interactive while starting a daemon."
(if (and (daemonp)
(not server-process))
(let ((noninteractive t))
ad-do-it)
ad-do-it))
(ad-activate 'command-line)
However, this doesn't work. I still get the same hanging behaviour. Indeed, putting a 'message' call inside the advice shows that the advice isn't invoked at all.
Similar question: emacs-daemon startup freezes if file has auto-save data. However this solution does not work for initial-buffer-choice. The accepted answer seems to have been edited from a previous version which may have successfully defined advice on command-line as I attempted to do, but unfortunately this version is now gone and replaced with a desktop.el-specific version.
Based upon the description of the behavior reported by the original poster in the question to this thread, it would appear that when Emacs is activated with --daemon, the initial-buffer-choice (i.e., to find-file-noselect "~/.../todo.org" [see ... lisp/startup.el]) is being activated in the start-up sequence before the default setting of auto-save can be disabled with (setq auto-save-default nil). Provided that changing the order has no effect [i.e., placing (setq auto-save-default nil) higher up in priority in the initialization file so that it precedes the initial-buffer-choice], then the next step is to take affirmative action to ensure that auto-save is disabled before opening a file (e.g., todo.org). This can be achieved by placing (setq initial-buffer-choice t) and (setq auto-save-default nil) in the init.el or .emacs file (without a hook) -- then, to ensure that all other settings have been loaded first, use the emacs-startup-hook to (kill-buffer "*scratch*") and (find-file "~/.../todo.org") -- this ensures that auto-save is disabled before find-file is called (which uses find-file-noselect [see ... lisp/files.el]).