Re: Change in emacsclient behavior

[David Kastrup]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>     >     5. Become a pipe for Emacs (which may or may not produce
>     >     any terminal output).
>     >
>     > These all seem useful in principle.  5 seems hard and I doubt
>     > it is worth implementing.
>
>     It would make it possible to configure an Emacsclient invocation
>     as a $PAGER command.
>
> Sorry, I do not follow.

Executables like "man" use a pager configurable in $PAGER for their
output.  Calling man in an Emacs shell session creates a lot of
garbage due to terminal problems.  It would be much nicer if one could
configure something into $PAGER which just sucked up its stdin and
made it available in a separate Emacs buffer in view mode.  In fact, I
_have_ something like that configured as a pager, namely the following
executable:

#!/bin/sh
TMP=`mktemp -t emacs-pager.XXXXXX`
trap "rm $TMP* 2>/dev/null" 0
echo '-*- mode: view; auto-revert-interval: 1; mode: auto-revert-tail; 
view-exit-action: kill-buffer -*-' >"$TMP"
exec 5<&0 <&-
cat "$@" <&5 >>"$TMP" &
eval "${VISUAL:-${EDITOR}}" '"$TMP"'

Now this has several drawbacks: it takes a longer startup time, it
needs a temporary file, and it does not stop the data generating
process when the material will not get read to its end, anyway.

For example (a useless example, agreed),

yes|$PAGER

works well with $PAGER being less and/or more, but redirecting to a
temporary file is not so great.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum