Emacs “start-server” does not change variable “server-mode”

Question

I'm running Emacs 23 in Debian Squeeze. ~/.emacs does not contain any server-related commands.

I launch Emacs and enter C-h v server-mode, which returns nil, as no server is running. I then enter M-x start-server, which starts an Emacs server in the running instance of Emacs.

However, the variable server-mode is still nil when I check it again. Only after running M-x server-mode, does variable server-mode get a value of t. Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?

Server-mode works fine after entering start-server; I can use emacsclient to open a file in the Emacs server. However, I wanted to use variable server-mode in the mode-line to indicate if the server is running, but if starting the server with start-server does not change the value of server-mode, this will not work as expected.

Answer 1

To get the functionality I need/expect (from a freshly-started Emacs), I run M-x server-mode to start the server, rather than server-start. Starting the server this way changes the value of variable server-mode to t.

I do not understand why starting the server with the documented server-start does not set the variable server-mode to t.

Answer 2

A better way is to use (server-running-p) from server package. For example

(require 'server)
(unless (server-running-p)
    (server-start))