Re: Comint and windows

[Sam Halliday <sam.halliday@gmail.com>]

Thanks Eli, that was exactly it! It was possible to tell the subprogram (a Java app that uses jline) to not buffer and everything started to work.

On Thursday, 5 November 2015 16:22:48 UTC, Eli Zaretskii  wrote:
> > Date: Thu, 5 Nov 2015 00:12:51 -0800 (PST)
> > From: Sam Halliday <sam.halliday@gmail.com>
> > 
> > I've been forced to use Windows at work and I'm finding some of my modes don't work.
> > 
> > One mode that is not working for me is sbt-mode:
> > 
> > https://github.com/hvesalai/sbt-mode/issues/33
> > 
> > It is a pretty standard implementation of a major mode that talks to an external process via comint. But it looks like commands typed in emacs are not being sent to the process.
> > 
> > Are there any known gotchas with writing these sorts of modes to run on windows?
> 
> Yes.  It's likely a buffering issue.  Windows doesn't have pty's, so
> communications with subprocesses is via pipes, which fail the isatty
> test, and so the subprocess most probably buffers its standard
> streams because it doesn't sense that they are connected to a terminal
> device.
> 
> Try invoking the subprocess in a way that disables buffering of
> stdin/stdout on the subprocess's side.  It could be some command-line
> switch or maybe some command you need to invoke immediately after
> invoking the subprocess.  (If there's no such option, ask the
> developers to provide one, or hack the code yourself.)