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browse-url/w32-shell-execute problems on cygwin
From: |
Ken Brown |
Subject: |
browse-url/w32-shell-execute problems on cygwin |
Date: |
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 11:47:30 -0400 |
User-agent: |
Thunderbird 2.0.0.21 (Windows/20090302) |
In browse-url.el, browse-url-browser-function is set to
browse-url-default-windows-browser on cygwin. But the definition of
browse-url-default-windows-browser uses w32-shell-execute, which is
defined in w32fns.c and is not included in the cygwin build. My
personal workaround for years has been the following:
;; Minimal replacement for w32-shell-execute under Cygwin.
(defun w32-shell-execute (operation document &optional parameters show-flag)
(if (string-equal operation "open")
(shell-command (concat "cygstart " (shell-quote-argument document)))))
(Note: For those not familiar with cygstart, it is a cygwin utility that
will launch anything that you can type in the "Start Menu" -> "Run" box
in windows. For example, typing 'cygstart "http://google.com"' in a
cygwin shell will open the default windows browser and go to google.)
This has always sufficed for my purposes, though I suppose it would be
better to implement other operations besides "open" or, at least, give a
"not implemented" error if there's an attempt to use some other operation.
Now that I am cygwin's emacs maintainer, I would like to replace this
personal workaround by a suitable change to the emacs sources. Can
someone more knowledgeable than I am propose or apply a patch so that
cygwin users won't get an error when they try to use browse-url? One
option would be to implement w32-shell-execute. Another would be to
redefine browse-url-default-windows-browser so that, in cygwin, it
simply calls cygstart on the URL. Maybe there's a better solution.
Second problem: browse-url-of-file doesn't work right under cygwin
because it relies on browse-url-file-url to convert the file name to a
URL; but the URL it returns is not in a form that a windows browser can
understand. For example, evaluating
(browse-url-file-url "/home/kbrown/html/index.html")
yields "file:/home/kbrown/html/index.html", but (on my system) it would
need to be "file://d:/cygwin-1.7/home/kbrown/html/index.html" for the
windows browser to be able to handle it.
My personal workaround has been to bypass browse-url-file-url completely
and instead modify browse-url-of-file:
- (browse-url (browse-url-file-url file))
+ (w32-shell-execute "open" file)
The point here is that there is no need to convert the file name to a
URL; the cygwin shell command 'cygstart "/home/kbrown/html/index.html"'
does the job.
Again, I would appreciate it if someone could find a way to fix the
problem in the emacs sources. If you could even just give me some
pointers as to what approach would be acceptable, I could probably
provide a patch.
Thanks.
Ken