First elisp patch for emacs chrome

Posted on Sat 09 January 2010 by alex in general

One of the nice things about putting your coding experiments up early and under a permissive license is people can submit patches. I'd been trying to get the native elisp edit server working but I'd fallen back to the working python script as I've been busy at work. However along comes Riccardo Murri who cleaned up the code and got it working. I've pushed the changes to the repo and with a little extra glue spawn it when emacs is in --daemon mode:

;; Do we want an edit-server?
(if (and (daemonp) (maybe-load-library "edit_server"))
    (edit-server-start))

And bingo you save the cost of 2 unnecessary fork/execve's to get emacs editing your Google Chrome(ium) hosted <textarea>. It seems to have an odd interaction with longlines-mode though which I need to investigate, perhaps longlines mode does magic stuff with the buffer text on save which gets skipped when the edit server does it's thing?

I've submitted the extension to the Google extension gallery although it's currently held up in actual physical paperwork. As my content script needs fairly liberal permissions to work I have to at least demonstrate I'm not an evil hacker/spammer intent on creating browser malware. I may take advantage of the delay to some clean ups to the browser feedback as we will likely be housebound sheltering from the weather. That is of course unless anyone else beats me to it :-)