Re: a suggested solution for better external' completion in certain emacs modes

[storm@cua.dk (Kim F. Storm)]

Nic Ferrier <nferrier@tapsellferrier.co.uk> writes:

>> I thought these command would go thru the pty to the subprogram.
>> Are you thinking that Readline would talk to Emacs thru a socket?
>> That's ok if you make it work.
>
> No. I think they would go through the pty to the subprogram. I was
> suggesting that Readline would stop seeing the pty as a pty and treat
> it more like a stream.

That's a bad idea, imo.

Consider if the subprogram is a shell that can launch another program.
Then the readline extensions should only be used when the shell
has control, but not when other programs are running.

But how can you know when the shell is reading from the stream, or
when it is the sub-subprogram that's reading?


If you go to the trouble of improving this, it would be better to
have a control socket into readline which could ALSO inform comint
whether the readline API is currently active or not, i.e. it would
send messages like:

rl_ready
rl_hold
rl_continue
rl_exit

to inform you of whether it makes any sense to use any of the
rl_api functions.

-- 
Kim F. Storm <storm@cua.dk> http://www.cua.dk