I run Emacs on Mac OS X as a server. What I don't do is "emacs --daemon". I launch Emacs and then "M-x server-start RET". This seems to avoid any weird issues.
Huh. This works for both -t and -c in emacsclient, with a vanilla build of pre-24.4. It didn't for ages, so thanks for getting me to check this out again!
I'm not very familiar with OS X, and I've had a lot of trouble finding the magic invocation that'll get an Emacs daemon running with the same behavior to which I'm accustomed on Windows and Linux. This looks like it should do the trick, thanks! Now if only I could get emacsclient to behave sensibly in the dock, I'd really be cooking with fire...
I wish I could muster the energy to figure out how going that particular route is flawed. I just know that it's one of the ones I tried, and I learned the hard way that it's got problems.
If you run it with --daemon, the server process doesn't create a frame of its own, but only listens for connections from emacsclient instances; IIRC it also rebinds C-x C-c to delete-frame (also available at C-x 5 0), and the daemon process stays alive through everything short of M-x kill-emacs or similar.
;; schedule starting of Emacs server after everything else is loaded (5 min
;; *should* be anough for startup :))
(run-at-time "5 min" nil 'server-start)
in my .emacs - this way I get both a window and a "daemon" server for use with emacsclient. I think it dies if the first frame is closed, though.
at the end of your init file, and it'll behave more or less as you intend; if you've got a lot of stuff hanging off after-init-hook, you might do well to hang server-start off it as well.
That said, yeah, it will create a window which if killed will shut down Emacs, so I tend to prefer invoking it with the --daemon option instead; that way, I don't have to worry about accidentally killing Emacs if I kill the wrong frame. (I also call server-start in my init file, but I'm not actually sure that is necessary when invoking Emacs with --daemon.)
If you're on a Mac (as I am) it leaves an Emacs application running (complete with menu bar and app switcher icon) that you can't interact with. But otherwise, --daemon works great.
I'm on Mavericks running Emacs 24.3 installed through `brew`. I invoke `emacs --daemon` once when I start work and I have an alias and an Automator workflow to open files in GUI `emacsclient`s. No problems at all. What sort of issues are you seeing?
