bug#72224: Two bugs in windows operating system

bug#72224: Two bugs in windows operating system

[yellowPolyp via Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors]

There are two bugs in GNU Emacs running on Windows OS. 
First, When Emacs is opened in terminal mode, it displays some dark colors as 'green'. Usually these dark color has G and B which is bigger than 0. I think that it's related to `w32console`. 
Second, when I start dynamic programs like `sh` or `gdb` using `start-process`, Emacs shows error `starting child process:invalid argument`. This makes commands like `term` and `compile` unusable. 
Except these bugs, I'm having fun using Emacs. Thank you very much for creating this awesome text editor.

bug#72224: Two bugs in windows operating system

[Eli Zaretskii]

tags 72224 unreproducible moreinfo
thanks

> Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2024 12:50:34 +0000
> From:  yellowPolyp via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs,
>  the Swiss army knife of text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
> 
> There are two bugs in GNU Emacs running on Windows OS. 

It is better to report each issue in a separate bug report, so that
they are easier to track.

> First, When Emacs is opened in terminal mode, it displays some dark colors as 'green'. Usually these dark color has G and B which is bigger than 0. I think that it's related to `w32console`. 

This is not a bug.  Emacs on TTY frames transparently approximates the
colors using the available ones, the ones that the terminal actually
supports, in this case it maps them to the 16 available colors.  One
deliberate feature of this mapping is that non-gray colors are
preferred, so that the probability of a color to be mapped to a
distinct non-gray color is higher.  What you see is a side effect of
that deliberate design.

> Second, when I start dynamic programs like `sh` or `gdb` using `start-process`, Emacs shows error `starting child process:invalid argument`. This makes commands like `term` and `compile` unusable. 

I cannot reproduce this.  Please show a detailed recipe starting from
"emacs -Q".  Please also tell which version of Emacs are you using and
how you invoke Emacs.

bug#72224: Two bugs in windows operating system

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: 72224@debbugs.gnu.org
> Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2024 11:54:35 +0300
> From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
> 
> > Second, when I start dynamic programs like `sh` or `gdb` using `start-process`, Emacs shows error `starting child process:invalid argument`. This makes commands like `term` and `compile` unusable. 
> 
> I cannot reproduce this.  Please show a detailed recipe starting from
> "emacs -Q".  Please also tell which version of Emacs are you using and
> how you invoke Emacs.

Ping!  can you please answer my questions, so we could make progress
with this issue?

bug#72224: Two bugs in windows operating system

[Eli Zaretskii]

[Please use Reply All to reply, to keep the bug tracker CC'ed.]

> Date: Sun, 04 Aug 2024 08:04:16 +0000
> From: yellowPolyp <yellowPolyp@proton.me>
> 
> It's a stack exchange question describing the same problem as mine. 
> https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/48422 . 

That talks about ansi-term.  ansi-term doesn't work on MS-Windows
(because sub-processes cannot use PTYs to talk to Emacs), and in
particular the stty command will not do what you expect, so the error
is expected.

Your original report said something much more general: that starting
programs with start-process didn't work, including invoking GDB.  If
that was also via ansi-term, then there's nothing more to do here,
it's just a limitation of Emacs on Windows.  To invoke GDB from Emacs,
use "M-x gdb" instead.

Thanks.

bug#72224: Two bugs in windows operating system

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: 72224@debbugs.gnu.org
> Date: Sun, 04 Aug 2024 12:09:28 +0300
> From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
> 
> [Please use Reply All to reply, to keep the bug tracker CC'ed.]
> 
> > Date: Sun, 04 Aug 2024 08:04:16 +0000
> > From: yellowPolyp <yellowPolyp@proton.me>
> > 
> > It's a stack exchange question describing the same problem as mine. 
> > https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/48422 . 
> 
> That talks about ansi-term.  ansi-term doesn't work on MS-Windows
> (because sub-processes cannot use PTYs to talk to Emacs), and in
> particular the stty command will not do what you expect, so the error
> is expected.
> 
> Your original report said something much more general: that starting
> programs with start-process didn't work, including invoking GDB.  If
> that was also via ansi-term, then there's nothing more to do here,
> it's just a limitation of Emacs on Windows.  To invoke GDB from Emacs,
> use "M-x gdb" instead.

No further comments, so I presume the bug was fixed by the above
advice, and I'm therefore closing this bug.  If and when there is new
information about the details, we can reopen it.

bug#72224: Two bugs in windows operating system

[Sebastián Monía]

Hello yellowPolyp,

> Second, when I start dynamic programs like `sh` or `gdb` using
> `start-process`, Emacs shows error `starting child process:invalid
> argument`. This makes commands like `term` and `compile` unusable.

In Windows, a lot of the external tools that are considered standard for
*nix platforms, needs to be provided somehow (compile yourself, get
ready-made executables via the ezwinports project, etc).

For `gdb`, I suggest you try using the one in the MinGW64 project.

Regarding `term`, the easiest alternative for MS-Windows is to use
`shell` instead. At least, that's what I do myself. Instead of bash, you
would be using Windows' shell.

I hope this helped!

Regards,
Sebastián