Re: [h-e-w] gnuserv maintenance

[Paul Kinnucan]

Jason Rumney writes:
 > "Lennart Borgman" <address@hidden> writes:
 > 
 > > And yes I did have spec for emacsclient in my head. It looks like there are
 > > the same difficulties there since emacsclient has a switch --no-wait (-n).
 > > Maybe just adding -w would be the best there too. The differences between
 > > emacsclient and emacsclientw with regard to default behaviour must then be
 > > the same to get things working on ms windows.
 > 
 > What exactly doesn't work when the default behaviour is to not wait?
 > 
 > Previously David was confused and thought that DOS boxes would stay
 > around for Explorer users, but with gnuclientw they don't. I have yet
 > to see anyone put forward any other reason why gnuclientw needs to
 > exit immediately.
 > 
 > Who knows what programs someone might want to use gnuclientw
 > from. Some of them might have the same bug as Explorer Shortcuts on
 > Windows 9x and NT where they cannot specify any arguments. I think it is
 > more important that gnuclientw and emacsclient works for them than for
 > it to exit immediately just because some people happen to like it as
 > the default behaviour with no justification.

I agree. It would be very nice to enable standard I/O for 
gnuclientw/gnuclient and allow the external process to pass
arbitrary Lisp expressions to the standard input of Emacs for
evaluation and to pass the results to the standard input
of the external process. I've done something like this for
the Java Development Environment for Emacs. The JDEE has an interface
between Emacs and a Java interpreter in which Java programs running
in the Java interpreter can pass Lisp expressions to Emacs for
evaluation and Emacs Lisp programs can pass Java expressions
to the exernal Java interpreter for evaluation.

It is possible to enable standard I/O for programs built as Windows
apps as well as for programs built as console apps. I've done this for
a Windows app that I developed that required a Java program to execute
shell commands and thereby needed to start and pass commands to the
shell.  To avoid the ugly DOS window, I wrote a little helper Windows
app in C that accepted standard output from the Java app and passed it
to the standard input of a a windowless DOS shell that it started, and
vice versa. The helper app itself was configured to never show its
window. It took quite a bit of digging for me to figure out how to do
this. I'd be glad to share what I learned with gnuclientw's
maintainer.


- Paul