Re: Recent documents: Emacs and GNOME integration

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    I'm not sure whether this has been already done, but here's a short
    piece of elisp that adds every file open in emacs to the system-wide
    list of recently used files. It will work for systems using Recent File
    Storage Specification [1], such as GNOME [2]. Hopefully, GNOME Deskbar
    Applet [3] will soon be able to use that list, giving you something
    close to a system-wide equivalent of the excellent iswitchb mode [4].

    (defun local-add-file-to-recent ()
      (when buffer-file-name
	(start-process "addtorecent.py" nil "addtorecent.py"
			       (concat "file://" buffer-file-name)
    "text/plain")))

    (add-hook 'find-file-hook 'local-add-file-to-recent)

That is quite clear and simple.  But we would like to make it work
totally automatically, which means, Emacs needs to decide automatically
whether to do this or not.

How should Emacs decide that?

Would testing the existence of the executable addtorecent.py
in PATH be the right criterion?

    Is there an Emacs package for xml manipulation (adding new nodes,
    etc.)?

    Recently-used.el [7] works in the opposite direction: it makes the
    system-wide list of recently used files available to Emacs.

That could be a superior method, esp. if it allows Emacs to easily
determine whether this list exists on your machine.  I expect it to
be more efficient also, but maybe addtorecent.py is fast enough.