Re: emacs-everywhere

[Eliot Moss <moss@cs.umass.edu>]

On 3/8/2022 4:49 AM, Russell VT wrote:
 > On Sun, Mar 6, 2022 at 7:33 PM Eliot Moss <moss@cs.umass.edu <mailto:moss@cs.umass.edu>> wrote:
 >
 >     On 3/6/2022 9:00 PM, Russell VT wrote:
 >      > Are you running Thunderbird under Cygwin (ie. in an "X" environment?), or are you running it
 >      > directly from Windows?
 >
 >     Thanks for responding, Russell.  Directly under Windows.
 >
 >
 > Ok, that means it's going to need a little bit of "work" to even be "aware" of the Cygwin
 > environment. So, anything you fork from ThunderBird will need to have its environment setup
 > "somewhere," or will end up with a "default" Cygwin environment.
 >
 > This may make things either much easier, or much more difficult. (depending on perspective... LOL)
 >
 >
 >     Can it run under Cygwin?  I am running Cygwin/X with
 >     emacs, xterm, okular, etc.
 >
 >
 > Well, it sounds like you've already done "the hard work" ... but, given enough time and resources,
 > ThunderBird can run just about anywhere.
 >
 > https://developer.thunderbird.net/thunderbird-development/building-thunderbird
 >
 > I'm not exactly sure anyone has gone down this path, however.
 >
 >
 > So, the IMPORTANT question is... how do you "normally" invoke this sort of action from Thunderbird,
 > in your other environments? And, what do "we" need to change/fix to make it work, like you would
 > like it to work? (Again, I'm assuming you have this "working" in your other  environments)
 >
 > After that, HOW do we do it from the command line, in Cygwin? (presumably with an X environment
 > already present/running)

The method I use at present is not available in later Thunderbirds.  Presently
I use an External Editor add-on.  If I type control-E it fires up a (Windows)
emacs and I can edit there, save and exit, and the edited email is back in
Thunderbird.  But Thunderbird totally changed their add-on technology a few
years ago and this addon has never been updated.  (It's a pretty simple
add-on, but since I know little about Thunderbird's internals I don't know how
to recreate it in their new setup.)

The notion with emacs-everywhere is to bind some key globally in Windows to
invoke it.  First I would select stuff into the cut/paste buffer, then invoke
emacs-everywhere, and the buffer's contents would appear in emacs.  I would
edit, exit that pop-up emacs, and the edited text would be in the paste
buffer, which I could paste back into Thunderbird.  Not quite as seamless as
before, but not as bad as explicit cut and paste back and forth.  This is
soething I do all the time, so minimizing the actions needed is of significant
utility (to me, anyway).

It does occur to me, however, that if I am willing to run Thunderbird from
WSL, this all might work more or less out of the box.  But the stumbling block
at present is the lack of xdotool that can be invoked by emacsclient to start
an emacs-everywhere pop-up window.  Unless someone with deeper knowledge of
emacs / emacs-everywhere or of X innards can suggest another way to do that.

Thanks for continuing to engage ....   Eliot