Re: making contents of other programs transparent to Emacs

[Joe Corneli <jcorneli@math.utexas.edu>]

   Well, for terminal programs (not X11), the program screen is
   cool.

Yes, I use it a lot, though I haven't spent much time trying to
configure the commands to match my preferences, but I think it can
be easily done.  For now, I've reverted to using the mouse to cut
and paste between programs.

I wonder if it would be possible to hack screen make it so that each
virtual terminal window was also a virtual Emacs buffer; this would
be a concrete step in the direction of making other programs
transparent to Emacs.

I have no progress so far on an Emacs-controlled X11.  

But here is a little background: part of the inspiration for
thinking about this stuff was a hope that the Ratpoison window
manager (which is like screen in many ways) could be more like
screen in terms of text selection.  

It is possible to send commands to Ratpoison from within Emacs, but
if you shift your focus away from Emacs, its game over for that.
(One could write a pretty simple patch to resolve that problem I
think, but this is a far cry from having every keyboard command
filtered through an Emacs process or having the contents of the
other programs available to that process.)