Emacs and Everything (~ locate) on Windows 8

Emacs and Everything (~ locate) on Windows 8

[Sebastien Vauban]

Hello,

I'm annoyed by the following problem:

- Everything (see http://www.voidtools.com/) apparently requires to run as an
  administrator on Windows Vista, 7 and 8 -- I did not have any problem at all
  under Windows XP

- Emacs can't communicate with it (to display the locate results, in Helm, for
  example) if it's not running as well as an administrator...

So, for the last few days, I'm running both programs as an administrator.

But that brings the following big inconvenients:

- I need to confirm, at every launch of Emacs, that I'm OK for it to run as an
  admin (User Account Control, UAC prompt)

- Files created under Emacs are now owned, by default, by "Adminstrators"

- When Emacs crashes, GDB can't connect to the process -- unless, I guess, if
  my terminal is running as well as an adminstrator

- and so on...

I guess I'm not the only one using Emacs and Everything on a recent Windows
platform. How did you solve this dilemna?

Best regards,
  Seb

-- 
Sebastien Vauban

Re: Emacs and Everything (~ locate) on Windows 8

[Jason Rumney]

On Thursday, 17 January 2013 20:51:55 UTC+8, Sebastien Vauban  wrote:

> - Everything apparently requires to run as an
>   administrator on Windows Vista, 7 and 8 -- I did not have any problem at all
>   under Windows XP

The Emacs annoyances you describe are directly caused by trying to adapt Emacs to the deficiencies of non-Free software.  Perhaps try another tool, such as GNU locate, which does not suffer such problems.

Re: Emacs and Everything (~ locate) on Windows 8

[Sebastien Vauban]

Jason Rumney wrote:
> On Thursday, 17 January 2013 20:51:55 UTC+8, Sebastien Vauban  wrote:
>
>> - Everything apparently requires to run as an
>>   administrator on Windows Vista, 7 and 8 -- I did not have any problem at all
>>   under Windows XP
>
> The Emacs annoyances you describe are directly caused by trying to adapt
> Emacs to the deficiencies of non-Free software. Perhaps try another tool,
> such as GNU locate, which does not suffer such problems.

I doubt it's related to the fact that Everything is not open (well free
regarding the price).

Another tool such as locate could certainly work, though it's not
straightforward to set up under Cygwin, and locate's contents is only updated
every once in a while.

Everything, on the other hand, is always fully up-to-date. You move a file, it
already knows about that. Very practical.

Best regards,
  Seb

--
Sebastien Vauban

Re: Emacs and Everything (~ locate) on Windows 8

[Valentin Baciu]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1526 bytes --]

I would try to setup an Windows batch file (.cmd) and call the "runas"
executable specifying a different user. With a little bit of tweaking you
should be able to make this work without entering your password very often
and by keeping the environment of your user.

Even though Voidtools runs as Administrator, it should run your Emacs (or
any other program) under a more restrictive account. My suggestion should
help you to accomplish that. This is really a question for their support
site...


On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 3:41 PM, Sebastien Vauban <
wxhgmqzgwmuf@spammotel.com> wrote:

> Jason Rumney wrote:
> > On Thursday, 17 January 2013 20:51:55 UTC+8, Sebastien Vauban  wrote:
> >
> >> - Everything apparently requires to run as an
> >>   administrator on Windows Vista, 7 and 8 -- I did not have any problem
> at all
> >>   under Windows XP
> >
> > The Emacs annoyances you describe are directly caused by trying to adapt
> > Emacs to the deficiencies of non-Free software. Perhaps try another tool,
> > such as GNU locate, which does not suffer such problems.
>
> I doubt it's related to the fact that Everything is not open (well free
> regarding the price).
>
> Another tool such as locate could certainly work, though it's not
> straightforward to set up under Cygwin, and locate's contents is only
> updated
> every once in a while.
>
> Everything, on the other hand, is always fully up-to-date. You move a
> file, it
> already knows about that. Very practical.
>
> Best regards,
>   Seb
>
> --
> Sebastien Vauban
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2088 bytes --]

Re: Emacs and Everything (~ locate) on Windows 8

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Sebastien Vauban" <wxhgmqzgwmuf@spammotel.com>
> Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2013 14:41:43 +0100
> 
> Another tool such as locate could certainly work, though it's not
> straightforward to set up under Cygwin

There is a native Windows port here:

  http://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/findutils-4.2.30-4-w32-bin.zip/download

although I never tried this on Windows 8, so caveat emptor.  I do use
this on Windows 7, and there are even 64-bit (as well as 32-bit)
binaries in the pack, which should be significantly faster on a 64-bit
OS.

> and locate's contents is only updated every once in a while.

You could set up a scheduled task that will run every hour, if you
really need the DB to be so up-to-date.  (I have such a task run once
a week, and I never had any problems with files I couldn't find.)

> Everything, on the other hand, is always fully up-to-date. You move a file, it
> already knows about that. Very practical.

If this is more important to you than get rid of the UAC prompts, then
you are already set up.

In any case, the list of measures I know of that might help you not to
get into trouble with UAC is:

  . Never run "as administrator", except for very rare and specific
    jobs.  Windows treats such users inherently dangerous and will pop
    up UAC prompts where it doesn't for other users.

  . If you possibly can, don't use a user who is "local admin";
    instead, use a "normal" user and grant that user all the necessary
    privileges via the Local Security Policy.

  . Take ownership on the entire hierarchy under C:\Users\YOUR-USERNAME;
    that will fix the ownership problems that Emacs might not like,
    because it doesn't always know that ownership by "Administrators"
    group is OK when the user FOO is a local admin.

  . Take ownership on any directory tree where you happen to work a
    lot, if that tree is not owned by you.

  . If you must run programs that write into C:\Program Files, take
    ownership on that directory and its subdirectories as well.

  . Some utilities might need a manifest where you tell Windows to run
    them at "asInvoker" level, to avoid the UAC prompts, because
    Windows in its infinite wisdom considers certain program names and
    even certain symbols inside them as evidence that the program
    might be "dangerous".  One example is the GNU Patch utility, but
    the exact rules by which Windows decides whether a program belongs
    to the dangerous lot are unpublished, so any program which pops up
    the UAC prompts should have a manifest created for it, before you
    conclude that it's something in the program's code that triggers
    that.

Not sure this will help you; I don't use Everything.  You may wish to
try Findutils anyway before you embark on the above adventure, who
knows, you might even like it.

Re: Emacs and Everything (~ locate) on Windows 8

[Sebastien Vauban]

Eli and all,

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>   . Never run "as administrator", except for very rare and specific
>     jobs.  Windows treats such users inherently dangerous and will pop
>     up UAC prompts where it doesn't for other users.

Update on this. Very hot. Everything's latest (beta) version of 10 January...
2013 [1] does solve the problem I had: Everything is now working without
requiring to "run as an administrator". So does run Emacs now, while getting
back the functionality I was striving for.

Problem is solved. Case closed.

Thanks for your help.

Best regards,
  Seb

[1] There have been a couple of changes since December 2012, after more than 2
years with no activity at all. I don't know which beta version does solve the
problem, but the very latest does.

-- 
Sebastien Vauban

Re: Emacs and Everything (~ locate) on Windows 8

[Yuri Khan]

On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 7:51 PM, Sebastien Vauban
<wxhgmqzgwmuf@spammotel.com> wrote:

> - Everything (see http://www.voidtools.com/) apparently requires to run as an
>   administrator on Windows Vista, 7 and 8 -- I did not have any problem at all
>   under Windows XP

Under XP, the first user created during setup is automatically an
administrator unless you take specific steps to avoid it.

> I guess I'm not the only one using Emacs and Everything on a recent Windows
> platform. How did you solve this dilemna?

You could write (or have someone (possibly the developer of
Everything) write for you) an intermediate program that would start as
administrator, interact with Everything, and provide a programmatic
interface over some form of interprocess communication to low
privilege users. (Ideally, it would have to check the access rights of
the connecting user against the access lists of the directories the
user is trying to search.) You might be able to tweak the ES
commandline client, or borrow some of its code, to do that.


That said, Everything seems to be a very ugly piece of software, even
for a Windows program, from an architectural point of view. (It should
have its service part split off of the GUI part, and it should not
contain an implementation of a server for an extension of the FTP
protocol.)