Re: Async commands in M-x compile

[Dan Nicolaescu <dann@gnu.org>]

Antoine Levitt <antoine.levitt@gmail.com> writes:

> Dan Nicolaescu <dann@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> Antoine Levitt <antoine.levitt@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org> writes:
>>>
>>>> On Jun 29, 2010, at 18:43, Antoine Levitt wrote:
>>>>> Hello,
>>>>> 
>>>>> Can someone explain to me why compile doesn't support asynchroneous
>>>>> commands, and especially why it silently fails instead of displaying an
>>>>> error message? I don't understand the mechanism involved here.
>>>>
>>>> The program run -- the shell -- exits (after having started some other
>>>> program in background).  The compilation command has finished, and
>>>> exited with an exit status that indicates success.  So, you're done.
>>>> I could argue that it "succeeded", though apparently not at doing
>>>> whatever it is that you think it should do.
>>>
>>> Yes, I would completely agree with that, except it _doesn't_ start the
>>> program. Try running "xclock &"
>>>
>>>>
>>>>> As a test, try M-x compile with "echo test > ~/test &" or "xclock &".
>>>>
>>>> Why would you need something like that?  Compilation mode already lets
>>>> you continue doing stuff in Emacs while the compilation runs.  And you
>>>> can use something like "make -j" to run multiple tasks in parallel,
>>>> without losing track of the exit statuses of subprocesses, like you
>>>> would with "&".
>>>>
>>>> If you're not actually trying to do compilation, but just run some
>>>> task in background without monitoring its progress or parsing error
>>>> messages after failure, there's shell-mode, or you can give
>>>> shell-command (M-!) a command ending with "&".
>>>
>>> Well, to be fair, I'm actually using compilation for another purpose
>>> than what it was built for. I want to perform the action "compile latex,
>>> if there is already a viewer, bring it to the front, if not, run one",
>>> ie,
>>>
>>> rubber -d main && (wmctrl -a main.pdf || gnome-open main.pdf &)
>>
>> Have you tried AUCTeX?  It should be able to do this by default ...
>> Alternatively, you can use the infrastructure in tex.el to accomplish
>> what you want.
>
> I used to use AUCTeX, but there is a number of things it doesn't do (at
> least, not without extensive coding, which I'm not prepared to
> do). 

Ask the AUCTeX list, using your preferred command should be one or two
lines of code, or just customization.

> Rubber checks for dependencies (including \input and
> \includegraphics), runs bibtex, and runs the right amount of times, all
> in one run. It also produces clean error output, which is something that
> has bugged me with AUCTeX. It's true that AUCTeX is able to run viewers
> etc, but I'm looking for a one-command solution, which I achieved with
> this shell line.

Then just run that command using one of the methods that were shown in
this thread.