One of the nicer extensions of mozilla I use is It’s all text. It allows you to call an external editor to edit text fields which is a really nice thing if you’re editing longer wiki pages, for instance.

Not surprisingly, my external editor of choice is XEmacs. But my XEmacs is heavily configured and loads a lot of stuff. Even worse, I usually run a beta version with debugging turned on, so that it runs extra slow, so the time gap between clicking on that little “edit” button below the text field and the moment when I could finally start typing started to annoy me quickly.

I remembered that some years ago I used to log in remotely to a running machine, fire up some script and have either my running XEmacs session connected or a new XEmacs process started. Connecting to the running XEmacs happens via gnuclient, so much was clear but gnuclient doesn’t start a new XEmacs if there is none running (actually, the server process gnuserv will die when the XEmacs process terminates, so there isn’t much gnuclient can do). The emacs wiki page linked to above already contains a number of scripts that eventually do what I need to do, but I’ve found none of them convincing, so here is my version. It’s linux specific in its BSD style call to ‘ps’ to determine the running processes, but should be portable sh otherwise. I could have sprinkled the fetch_procs function with OS specific variants, but as I’m currently running my XEmacs on linux only, I left that as an exercise to the reader.

[geshi lang=bash]

!/bin/sh

emacs=xemacs gnuclient=gnuclient gnuserv=gnuserv user=id -un

gnuclientopts=”“

fetch_procs () { ps xU $user }

runninggnuserv=fetch_procs | grep "[^]]$gnuserv" runningemacs=fetch_procs | grep "[^]]$emacs" if [ “$?” -eq “0” ]; then gnuservpid=echo $runninggnuserv | cut -f1 -d'' emacspid=echo $runningemacs | cut -f1 -d'' echo “Using running gnuserv $gnuservpid of emacs $emacspid” $gnuclient $gnuclientopts “$@” else echo “Starting new $emacs” $emacs “$@” fi [/geshi]

ObTitle: Panic at the disco, from the album “A fever you can’t sweat out”

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