Re: making contents of other programs transparent to Emacs

[Milan Zamazal <pdm@brailcom.org>]

>>>>> "JC" == Joe Corneli <jcorneli@math.utexas.edu> writes:

    JC> Suppose I wanted to make the contents of e.g. an rxvt or Mozilla
    JC> window readable to an Emacs.  What would I need to do?  The text
    JC> is available to X (and I can copy and paste it into other
    JC> programs) so it also seems that with more work I should be able
    JC> to treat the text in these other programs as a read-only Emacs
    JC> buffer.

I'm afraid the X selection mechanism is generally not much help to you,
since the way of selecting something is application specific.

But you might use accessibility features of applications for this, quite
easily.  For instance, if the given application supports AT-SPI, you can
query its contents via the AT-SPI interface.  There's no support for
this in Emacs directly, but there are programs that can do it and you
can call them from Emacs and insert their output into an Emacs buffer.
(Unfortunately, current accessibility support in Mozilla is very poor,
so this won't work for Mozilla now.)

Regards,

Milan Zamazal

-- 
real programmer?  don't get me started.  if you need to hide your
pathetic excuse for a carreer behind super-macho languages like C, C++,
and/or Perl instead of writing clean, maintainable, efficient code, you
aren't much of a real programmer in my view.  -- Erik Naggum in comp.emacs