Re: Emacs as platform for the application

[tfb@hurricane.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick)]

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Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> tfb@hurricane.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick) writes:
> 
> > To do this, you want to build your own Emacs; the elisp manual
> > contains an introduction to this.  What you have temacs, load in the
> > ordinary parts of elisp that your application is going to use (or all
> > of it, to be safe), and your application code.  When dumping the full
> > emacs, you can ctonrol what happens at startup.  Have startup start up
> > your application, and then you control all the keybindings, menu
> > items, etc., in the initial buffer.
> 
> Is it really better than "emacs -l foo.el -f foo-init"?  It seems
> like a lot of work for little gain.

Well, it depends on your goal.  I've only done this for one
application, but in that case it was worth it.  I didn't want to
deliver a full emacs, and it simplified things for the end user.  Most
of the time, though, you're right -- if you know the exact platform
(which you need to for my suggestion), you can distribute something
that puts files in the right places, and a shell script to start up
the application.

As for the "a lot of work" part, it's only a lot of work if you don't
know how to build Emacs.  And even still, relative to the amount of
work you'd put into an application you'd want to deliver this way,
it's probably trivial.

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