Re: Changes 2009-07-15/16 in branch?

[Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche@math.ntnu.no>]

+ David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>:

> Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche@math.ntnu.no> writes:
> 
> > On the mac, one can declare that application A should handle URL
> > scheme U. By default, mailto: URLs are handled by Mail.app, so that
> > clicking on a mailto: link on a web page causes Mail.app to open a
> > new draft message addressed to the given address. If I change this to
> > let emacs handle it, clicking on a mailto: link does activate emacs,
> > but nothing more happens.
> >
> > This is a "glaring deficiency" because, after all, clicking on mailto:
> > links on web pages is quite common, and if emacs cannot handle this,
> > we discourage users from using emacs for their mail.
> >
> > Should I file a bug report requesting this feature?
> 
> What I use is a helper script that looks like [...]

Are you a Mac user? Your email header seems to indicate that you are
primarily a gnu/linux user. On the Mac, there is no way that I can see
to talk Firefox into running a script or arbitrary program to handle a
mailto: URL. On the contrary, the mechanism in place involves
activating a fullblown Mac application, then sending it an Apple event
indicating the desired action. I suspect, though I haven't checked,
that the same is true of Opera, Camino, and Safari. This is the way
applications communicate on Mac OS X. I don't see that any shell
script is gonna work around this.

There *is* one possible workaround that I haven't checked, though:
Make a small, simple application that knows just enough to act as an
application, receive the Apple event, and run emacsclient. Most users
are going to find this awkward and unnatural.

The biggest problem is to find out what needs to be done. I dug around
a bit in nsterm.m and ns-win.el to try to figure out how the nextstep
event loop works, but not knowing how to read Objective C turns out to
be too big an obstacle. I think we need a real expert to look at it.
Maybe Adrian Robert is the only one who can do it? I don't know if he
left it out because he didn't think of it, or because he couldn't
figure it out either.

- Harald