From: John Carter <john.carter@...>
Date: 2006-08-04T09:27:07+09:00
Subject: Cute Emacs & Sawfish Hack for the day....

So I use emacs (latest from CVS) and gnome sawfish as my window manager.

But I...
* Hate the *sh languages, they have awful design.
* I want to reuse emacs sessions, not start up a new one every time.
* I want the emacs window to jump to the front if I invoke the client.

So emacs has emacsclient.

If you put
   (start-server)
in your ~/.emacs
you can...

Start up a normal emacs session...

emacs ~/bin/x

And start editing...

All Good.

Now suppose you back on the command line doing something and you want to
start editing smoothing else..

emacs something.else

Bah! That takes time to load up another emacs. I just want to use the
same...


So..
   emacsclient something.else
has the right effect.

But two problems...
   * I always forget about emacsclient. Or if I do remember, I forget I
     had closed the emacs session and must restart.
   * and it leaves the emacs session buried under a pile of
     other windows.

The emacs etc/emacs.bash has a gnarly bit of bash to work around the
first problem, but still leaves the second.

So here is a bit of ruby that does better...

#!/usr/bin/ruby -w

# I'm using the latest version of emacs from CVS...
EMACS_DIR = "/usr/local/bin"
EMACS_SUFFIX = "-cvs"
EMACS_CLIENT = "#{EMACS_DIR}/emacsclient#{EMACS_SUFFIX}"
EMACS = "#{EMACS_DIR}/emacs#{EMACS_SUFFIX}"
EMACS_SERVER_SOCKET = "/tmp/emacs#{Process.uid}/server"


# This is the cute bit....
# I tell sawfish to find a window with a name starting with "emacs"
# and raise it to the top...

def raise_window
   system %q{sawfish-client -e '(raise-window (get-window-by-name-re "^emacs"))'}
end

STDOUT.sync = true

any_non_option_arguments = ARGV.any?{|a| a !~ /^-/}

if !any_non_option_arguments
   raise_window
   exit
end

# Start up client, is we have server socket
if FileTest.exist? EMACS_SERVER_SOCKET
   puts "
Emacs server socket '#{EMACS_SERVER_SOCKET}' exists, invoking #{EMACS_CLIENT} 
--nowait #{ARGV.join(" ")}
"
   raise_window

   # This replaces this process with the emacsclient, which
   # just tells emacs to do it's thing then exits...
   exec( EMACS_CLIENT, "--no-wait", *ARGV)
   # Doesn't get here
end

puts "
No emacs server socket '#{EMACS_SERVER_SOCKET}'
Invoking '#{EMACS}' directly
"

# Pop an emacs session into the background.
fork do
   exec( EMACS, *ARGV)
end









John Carter                             Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639
Tait Electronics                        Fax   : (64)(3) 359 4632
PO Box 1645 Christchurch                Email : john.carter@tait.co.nz
New Zealand

Carter's Clarification of Murphy's Law.

"Things only ever go right so that they may go more spectacularly wrong later."

From this principle, all of life and physics may be deduced.