[TxMt] IDL Bundle

[Allan Odgaard]

On 5/6/2006, at 20:40, Ethan Gutmann wrote:

> [...] I wonder if it is possible to keep a persistent process open  
> in the background and send commands to it. I'm not sure how IDLWAVE  
> http://www.idlwave.org does this for emacs, I'm afraid that emacs  
> runs a complete shell of its own... I suppose this could be done  
> with a separate program that just passes information back and  
> forth, but that seems inelegant (and more difficult than it needs  
> to be).  All I need to do is start a process, pass strings to it as  
> standard in, and read standard out and error from it.

Conceptually this is possible using named pipes, e.g. we start by doing:

    % mkfifo in && mkfifo out
    % bash -s <in &>out &

Now we have bash running in the background with stdin/out/err  
connected to named pipes.

So from somewhere else we can send ‘date’ to bash by doing:

    % echo date >in

And then:

    % read res <out && echo "$res"
    Tue Jun  6 13:06:25 CEST 2006

This reads a line from the output of the background bash process and  
prints it.

Though the above will close the named pipes after writing/reading to/ 
from them. I am not skilled in file descriptor joggling from shell,  
but at least I know that POSIX does provide the necessary API for  
reading/writing w/o closing and waiting for output etc.

> [...] I would also like to inquire about the status of a plugin  
> API.  The web page says more is likely to be done here, has  
> anything been done?

No, and it’s unlikely something I will find time for anytime soon. If  
you have small requests then I am however willing to listen.

>   Eventually I might want to write a simple plugin that talks to  
> the IDL process and highlights associated lines in the editor  
> window (and possibly add a GUI for querying and displaying variables)

You should be able to pull that off with the existing capabilities.  
Either using the ODB Editor Interface to highlight the lines, or the  
txmt URL scheme -- as for GUI, you can inject anything into the TM  
program space using the current plug-in loading capabilities, which  
includes full-blown interactive GUIs.