Re: browse-url/w32-shell-execute problems on cygwin

[Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org>]

Ken Brown wrote:
> In browse-url.el, browse-url-browser-function is set to 
> browse-url-default-windows-browser on cygwin.
That is wrong, feel free to change it to a better default.

> Second problem: browse-url-of-file doesn't work right under cygwin 
> because it relies on browse-url-file-url to convert the file name to a 
> URL; but the URL it returns is not in a form that a windows browser 
> can understand.  For example, evaluating
>
>   (browse-url-file-url "/home/kbrown/html/index.html")
>
> yields "file:/home/kbrown/html/index.html", but (on my system) it 
> would need to be "file://d:/cygwin-1.7/home/kbrown/html/index.html" 
> for the windows browser to be able to handle it.

That is a general problem with cygwin interacting with non-cygwin 
programs. Cygwin invents its own virtual filesystem that is not 
understood outside of cygwin. See the problems the native build of Emacs 
faces with Cygwin make. I don't see how bypassing browse-url fixes this 
for you, as the path will still be one that Windows does not recognize.