Emacsclient / gnuclient for Lispworks

Emacsclient / gnuclient allow you to run a shell command and make an existing Emacs session read the file (or files?) listed on the command line.

Lispworks, of course, allows multiple "green" threads, and they have a convenient function already written that forks a listener running on a socket. I leveraged this to implement what I call "lwclient".

Put this in your $HOME/.lispworks:

;; Arrange for LW to start a Listener server once multiprocessing gets going.
;; Used by lwclient.
(push (list "start-lwserver"
            nil
            (lambda ()
              (comm:start-up-server :service 65000
                                    :address "localhost"
                                    :process-name "lwserver")))
      mp:*initial-processes*)

And put this in $HOME/bin/lwclient:

#!/usr/bin/zsh
(
  echo "lwclient$RANDOM"
  echo "(progn "
  for f in "$@" ; do
    if [[ $f = /* ]] ; then
      echo "(editor:find-file-command nil #p\"$f\")"
    else
      echo "(editor:find-file-command nil #p\"$PWD/$f\")"
    fi
  done
  echo ")"
) \
| nc -q 1 localhost 65000 \
> /dev/null

(Later I'll rewrite lwclient in actual Lisp, using the lw-console command I mentioned here.)

I even aliased "vi" to call "lwclient" instead:

function vi {
  lwclient "$@"
}

Usage example:

lwclient some_file
# or using my above alias
vi some_file

To use this, the Lispworks IDE has to be running, of course, and (at the moment) you need netcat (the "nc" command).

To invoke the real "vi", use "vim" (or whatever editor you used to use).

Caveat: If you ssh to your machine (and LW is already running there), use "vim" to run the real vim, otherwise Lispworks will happily pop up a window on your remote machine and your shell will look like this:

% vi some_file
%

and you'll smack yourself on the forehead and get a concussion.

And, in case you're a total neophyte, I'll also point out Caveat 2: This allows anyone with an account on your machine to run arbitrary code under your ID. Use with caution.

Update 6/20/07: See here for an updated version of lwclient.

tags: emacsclient  gnuclient  lispworks  lwclient  edited  

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