Re: making contents of other programs transparent to Emacs

[Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu>]

In article <mailman.813.1092235424.2011.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>,
 Joe Corneli <jcorneli@math.utexas.edu> wrote:

> This seems like a hard question, and not completely Emacs-specific.
> 
> Suppose I wanted to make the contents of e.g. an rxvt or Mozilla
> window readable to an Emacs.  What would I need to do?  The text is
> available to X (and I can copy and paste it into other programs) so
> it also seems that with more work I should be able to treat the text
> in these other programs as a read-only Emacs buffer.

As far as X is concerned, these windows are just pixels -- it doesn't 
keep track of the text.  This is done by the client applications.  
Copying and pasting is done by the application itself; when you use the 
Copy operation, the application sends a message to the X server telling 
it to put the text into the cut-buffer so that other applications can 
get at it.  But there's no way for one application to force another one 
to send it the contents of its window.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***