Hi,
I would like to control emacs/editors externally ie send a
Ctrl-X Ctrl-F filename to switch files.

I've tried to 'echo -e Ctrl sequence Ctrl X Ctrl F > /dev/pts/X
without success.

I'm interested in making a minimal develop enviroment (just the features I need) after getting annoyed by the bloat of eclipse and esp. NetBeans (which I do really like).
I need to be able to control emacs/vi/pico remotely.

Using redirection is a (slow) win all situation, but if you know how
to do this alternatively for (preferably) emacs please let me know.

Thanks.

NB Netbeans/Eclipse general Java stuff would be great after DSL got hold
of them!

What exactly are you trying to do, it's not clear?

An example would be to get a terminal to

echo -e some escape/control string

which sends Ctrl-X Ctrl F filename

to emacs -nw running in a different terminal.

Hence I could get an external program like a file manager to switch
which file I am editing in emacs.


My original idea was to get the /dev/pts/X of the terminal running
emacs -nw from tty, and then
execute
echo -e some escape/control string > /dev/pts/X

on a different terminal.

This does work in some form-> I can send plain text strings which
then appear in emacs, but I can do special keys, and don't know why/how.

-

Hope that is clearer.

You could use emacsclient: with the --no-wait (or -n) option will cause emacs to open the file given on the command line. With the --eval option you can run arbitrary elisp code which is more flexible than sending keystrokes.

Thanks for the reply,
took me a while to understand lisp syntax but got it to work.

Using this I can do what I want using xemacs, so I can get started.

Also if I have more than 2 xemacs windows open, can I use gnuclient
with both?

I'm using gnuclient -batch -f function

control lines.


Also very tempted to try using lisp to program, is this a good idea?
I will be linking a filename, interface to svn,cvs, and other progs. I
going to use python.

Is the /dev/pts/ redirection impossible? If I can do it then any
editor would be able to be used. Will use the emacs client though, as
it exists.

Hmm, I don't use XEmacs, so I'm not sure. For Emacs you can set the server-window variable to decide which frame or window to choose.

Certainly, that is the Emacs Way There is an interface for cvs built-in to emacs already, and psvn is a pretty good interface for svn.

Maybe the trick is to send a literal C-x C-f, looking that up on the ascii table :
So maybe

Thanks for the info
I'll look up and have a play with

server-window variable

and look up emacs cvs and psvn..

still can't get C-x C-f working, could this be my choice of terminal?
I can send text via > dev/pts/X but not Ctrl-sequences.

Well, I didn't actually test my idea, just thought I would throw it out. It doesn't work for me either However, I noticed that echoing text doesn't exactly work, the text shows up on screen, but Emacs treats it as if it wasn't there (running on /dev/tty2 have the same behaviour). I guess echoing to the pts doesn't do exactly the same thing as the user typing.