Ask HN: How would you make Emacs do this? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How would you make Emacs do this?

22 pointsabstractbill11 comments

For a long while now I've only used two applications almost all the time - a web browser, and Emacs. For reasons I can't quite explain but feel strongly about, I'd love to get that down to just one.

So I have the idea of being able to have a web site that's actually just a gateway to an Emacs instance running on one of my servers.

I don't have a problem imagining how I might do the web app itself - it would probably use html/javascript for presentation, and then a small piece of Flash code to give me a real tcp socket that I can use to talk to Emacs. No problem - I can do these kinds of things easily.

It would be useful to open and save-to local files in addition to ones already on the server. Again, using a little bit of Flash 10, I can make that happen easily.

Now the frontend needs to tell Emacs, via this socket, whenever the user presses a key. And Emacs in turn needs to tell the web app to update the display. I could easily decide on a simple socket protocol for these things.

But on the backend I don't have much idea at all - I've modified my own .emacs a bunch, but I've never actually hacked Emacs.

Does anyone have any pointers? Should I model this after an existing display toolkit (like motiff, gtk, etc)? Or would a different approach work better? Should I start writing this in ELisp, or am I very likely to actually need to drop down to C for some reason?

I don't see why it would really be beneficial - People who want to connect with a remote Emacs session just use ssh + screen or tmux, which is stable and quick to set up. If you really want to implement Emacs-over-the-web, though, familiarity with these might help:

distel - distributed elisp, via integration with Erlang (http://fresh.homeunix.net/~luke/distel/)

TRAMP - remote file editing (See e.g. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode)

Also, there are decent web browsers for Emacs. I like emacs-w3m. (http://emacs-w3m.namazu.org/)

How about the opposite: browse the Web from within Emacs? http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/emacs-w3m

[Edit: link to W3M, not the older W3]

I've been thinking about this too (http://blog.ianbicking.org/2010/05/04/browser-desktop-develo...) -- but I figured I'd just let go of Emacs in the process, presumably to replace it with Bespin: http://mozillalabs.com/bespin -- it is purported to have some Emacs keybindings (I haven't been able to enable them though).

Hmm. Perhaps one of these would make a decent starting point?

http://antony.lesuisse.org/software/ajaxterm/

http://anyterm.org/

http://testape.com/webtty_sample.php

You could look at Web Sockets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Sockets). I know Chrome supports it, not sure about other browsers. A friend made a very cool interactive multi-user app using this and was quite impressed at the responsiveness.

You can control Firefox from emacs using MozRepl. This extension allows you execute code on the browser. For example, you can tell emacs to refresh a specific tab when an html file is saved. MozRepl is not the only extension doing that. There are 4 or 5 similar projects.

More info http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MozRepl

I think it would be useful as, say, a chrome plugin. A hotkey to open up a new emacs tab right next to my webpage tabs would be nice.

How about something like this? http://nomachine.com/web-player.php Saving files locally might not be straight forward though.

For editing remote files, I find that sshfs is extremely useful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSHFS

To clarify, I don't have a problem editing remote files - I use TRAMP right now (haven't tried sshfs, but it looks interesting thanks!).

The problem I'm trying to solve is that right now I need to install Emacs on any computer I want to do work on. I'd like to be able to jump onto a random friend's laptop and open Emacs without any setup cost.

I like sshfs as well, but it seems to perform even slower than scp for me, and way slower than ssh.

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