Re: An Emacs plug-in for a browser (Firefox?)

[David De La Harpe Golden]

Paul Michael Reilly wrote:

> For example,
> "emacs://x.y.z/some/file/or/other.txt" when presented to the browser
> would fire up a tab on the browser with a full blown Emacs instance
> "embedded/buried" in it and edit the file other.txt with the full
> power of Emacs immersed in the browser.  Sandbox issues aside, what
> other issues need to be overcome to create such a browser plugin?
> 

Probably lots for full generality and security; but emacs IIRC already
supports the xembed protocol on X11 (--parent-id command line arg?), so
making a basic plugin for firefox should be straightforward on X11
platforms, since firefox also supports xembedding as part of its
extended plugin api on X11.

http://developer.mozilla.org/En/Plugins
- tells you how to write plugins.

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/XEmbed_Extension_for_Mozilla_Plugins
- tells you how to use xembed with mozilla plugins on X11 platforms.

On non-X11 platforms it's presumably quite a bit more awkward...


*** Note that if you don't want to _embed_ emacs into firefox windows,
just want the ability to type "emacs:filename" into the address bar,
then you can just define an external protocol handler:

Doing it this way is probably not entirely secure...

go to about:config

Following
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Register_protocol#Linux_and_Mac

add the following keys (right click -> new)
Boolean -> network.protocol-handler.external.emacs -> True
String -> network.protocol-handler.app.emacs /path/to/emacs-url-wrapper

after making an emacs-url-wrapper that strips the leading "emacs:" from
its arg e.g. (unsafe)

#!/bin/bash
exec emacs $(echo "$1" | sed 's/emacs://')

Now, emacs:/tmp/blah.txt in the firefox address bar should pop up an
emacs...