README updates.
[bpt/emacs.git] / README.multi-tty
1 -*- coding: utf-8; mode: text; -*-
2 GOAL
3 ----
4
5 The goal of this branch is to implement support for opening multiple,
6 different tty devices and simultaneous X and tty frames from a single
7 Emacs session.
8
9 Some use cases:
10 Emacs is notoriously slow at startup, so most people use another
11 editor or emacsclient for quick editing jobs from the console.
12 Unfortunately, emacsclient was very awkward to use, because it did not
13 support opening a new Emacs frame on the current virtual console.
14 Now, with multi-tty support, it can do that. (Emacsclient starts up
15 faster than vi!)
16
17 Some Gnus users (including me) run Gnus in an X frame in its own Emacs
18 instance, which they typically leave running for weeks. It would be
19 nice if they could connect to this instance from a remote ssh session
20 and check their messages without opening a remote X frame or resorting
21 to gnus-slave.
22
23 WHO IS DOING IT
24 ---------------
25
26 I'm Károly Lőrentey. My address: lorentey@elte.hu.
27
28 Comments, bug reports, suggestions and patches are welcome; send them
29 to multi-tty@lists.fnord.hu.
30
31 MAILING LISTS
32 -------------
33
34 The multi-tty mailing list (discussion & bug reports):
35
36 Address: multi-tty@lists.fnord.hu
37 Signup: http://lists.fnord.hu/mailman/listinfo/multi-tty
38 Archive: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.multi-tty/
39
40 Commit notifications (read-only):
41
42 Address: multi-tty-commits@lists.fnord.hu
43 Signup: http://lists.fnord.hu/mailman/listinfo/multi-tty-commits
44
45
46 STATUS
47 ------
48
49 The branch is now very stable and almost full-featured. All of the
50 major problems have been fixed, only a few minor issues remain. (It
51 still needs to be ported to Windows/Mac/DOS, though.) Both multiple
52 tty device support and simultaneous X and tty frame support works
53 fine. Emacsclient has been extended to support opening new tty and X
54 frames. It has been changed open new Emacs frames by default.
55
56 The multi-tty branch has been scheduled for inclusion in the next
57 major release of Emacs (version 22). I expect the merge into the
58 development trunk to occur sometime during next year (2005), after the
59 merge of the Unicode branch.
60
61 Tested on GNU/Linux, Solaris 8, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Please let me
62 know if you succeed or fail to use it on other platforms---I'll have a
63 few tricky test cases for you.
64
65 Known problems:
66
67 * Mac, Windows and DOS support is broken, probably doesn't
68 even compile -- this will be solved later.
69
70 HOW TO GET THE BRANCH
71 ---------------------
72
73 The branch uses GNU Arch (http://www.gnuarch.org) for version control.
74
75 Retrieving the latest version of the branch:
76
77 tla register-archive http://lorentey.hu/arch/2004/
78 tla get lorentey@elte.hu--2004/emacs--multi-tty <directory>
79
80 This incantation uses my private archive mirror that is hosted on a
81 relatively low-bandwidth site; if you are outside Hungary, you will
82 probably want to you use the Arch supermirror instead:
83
84 tla register-archive http://mirrors.gnuarch.org/lorentey@elte.hu--2004/
85 tla get lorentey@elte.hu--2004/emacs--multi-tty <directory>
86
87 (I use a recent tla development snapshot, but any of the released
88 versions of arch will do fine, I think.) My GPG key id is 0FB27A3F;
89 it is available from hkp://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net/, or my homepage at
90 http://lorentey.hu/rolam/gpg.html)
91
92 To update your source tree to the latest revision after the first
93 checkout, simply use the following command:
94
95 tla replay lorentey@elte.hu--2004/emacs--multi-tty--0
96
97 If you are interested, you can find more information about Arch on
98 http://wiki.gnuarch.org/. It's a wonderful source control system, I
99 highly recommend it.
100
101 If you don't have tla, the branch has a homepage from which you can
102 download conventional patches against Emacs CVS HEAD:
103
104 http://lorentey.hu/project/emacs.html
105
106
107 COMPILATION
108 -----------
109
110 The multi-tty branch is compiled the same way as Emacs itself:
111
112 make maintainer-clean # (If you have compiled Emacs before)
113
114 ./configure <your favourite options>
115 make bootstrap
116 make install
117
118 If you have strange compilation errors, they may be caused by old
119 *.elc files that are left over from an earlier bootstrap. The `make
120 maintainer-clean' target deletes them, so it is a good idea to run
121 that before reporting a bug. (Emacs requires a clean recompilation
122 after certain kinds of source code changes.)
123
124 TESTING
125 -------
126
127 To test the multi-tty branch, start up the Emacs server with the
128 following commands:
129
130 emacs
131 M-x server-start
132
133 and then (from a shell prompt on another terminal) start emacsclient
134 with
135 emacsclient -t /optional/file/names... (for a tty frame)
136 emacsclient /optional/file/names... (for an X frame)
137
138 (Make sure both emacs and emacsclient are multi-tty versions.)
139 You'll hopefully have two fully working, independent frames on
140 separate terminals. The new frame is closed automatically when you
141 finish editing the specified files (C-x #), but delete-frame (C-x 5 0)
142 also works. Of course, you can create frames on more than two tty
143 devices.
144
145 Creating new frames on the same tty with C-x 5 2 works, and they
146 behave the same way as in previous Emacs versions. If you exit emacs,
147 all terminals should be restored to their previous states.
148
149 This is work in progress, and probably full of bugs. You should
150 always run emacs from gdb, so that you'll have a live instance to
151 debug if something goes wrong. Please send me
152 (multi-tty@lists.fnord.hu) your bug reports.
153
154 TIPS & TRICKS
155 -------------
156
157 I think the best way to use the new Emacs is to have it running inside
158 a disconnected GNU screen session, and always use emacsclient for
159 normal work. One advantage of this is that not a single keystroke of
160 your work will be lost if the display device that you are using
161 crashes, or the network connection times out, or whatever. (I had an
162 extremely unstable X server for some time while I was developing these
163 patches, and running Emacs this way has saved me a number of M-x
164 recover-session invocations.)
165
166 I use the following two bash functions to handle my Emacs sessions:
167
168 ,----[ ~/.bash_profile
169 | # Usage: preload-emacs <name> [<waitp>]
170 | #
171 | # Preloads the Emacs instance called NAME in a detached screen
172 | # session. Does nothing if the instance is already running. If WAITP
173 | # is non-empty, the function waits until the server starts up and
174 | # creates its socket; otherwise it returns immediately.
175 | function preload-emacs {
176 | local name="$1"
177 | local waitp="$2"
178 | local screendir="/var/run/screen/S-$USER"
179 | local serverdir="/tmp/emacs$UID"
180 | local emacs=emacs # Or wherever you installed your multi-tty Emacs
181 |
182 | if [ -z "$name" ]; then
183 | echo "Usage: preload-emacs <name> [<waitp>]" >&2
184 | return 1
185 | fi
186 |
187 | if [ ! -e "$screendir"/*."$name" ]; then
188 | if [ -e "$serverdir/$name" ]; then
189 | # Delete leftover socket (for the wait option)
190 | rm "$serverdir/$name"
191 | fi
192 | screen -dmS "$name" "$emacs" -nw --eval "(setq server-name \"$name\")" -f server-start
193 | fi
194 | if [ ! -z "$waitp" ]; then
195 | while [ ! -e "$serverdir/$name" ]; do sleep 0.1; done
196 | fi
197 | return 0
198 | }
199 |
200 | # Usage: connect-emacs <name> <args>...
201 | #
202 | # Connects to the Emacs instance called NAME. Starts up the instance
203 | # if it is not already running. The rest of the arguments are passed
204 | # to emacsclient.
205 | function connect-emacs {
206 | local name="$1"
207 | shift
208 |
209 | if [ -z "$name" ]; then
210 | echo "Usage: connect-emacs <name> <args>..." >&2
211 | fi
212 | preload-emacs "$name" wait
213 | emacsclient -s "$name" "$@"
214 | }
215 |
216 | export -f preload-emacs connect-emacs
217 |
218 | # Preload editor and gnus sessions for speedy initial connects.
219 | preload-emacs editor
220 | preload-emacs gnus
221 `----
222
223 ,----[ ~/.bashrc
224 | alias gnus="connect-emacs gnus"
225 | alias edit="connect-emacs editor"
226 | alias et="connect-emacs editor -t"
227 | alias e=edit
228 `----
229
230
231 NEWS
232 ----
233
234 For the NEWS file: (Needs work)
235
236 ** Support for multiple terminal devices has been added.
237
238 *** You can specify a terminal device (`tty' parameter) and a terminal
239 type (`tty-type' parameter) to `make-terminal-frame'.
240
241 *** You can test for the presence of multiple terminal support by
242 testing for the `multi-tty' feature.
243
244 *** Emacsclient has been extended to support opening a new terminal
245 frame. Its behaviour has been changed to open a new Emacs frame by
246 default. Use the -c option to get the old behavior of opening
247 files in the currently selected Emacs frame.
248
249 *** A make-frame-on-tty function has been added to make it easier to
250 create frames on new terminals.
251
252 *** New functions: frame-tty-name, frame-tty-type for accessing
253 terminal parameters, and delete-tty for closing the terminal
254 device.
255
256 *** talk.el has been extended for multiple tty support.
257
258
259 ** Support for simultaneous graphical and terminal frames has been
260 added.
261
262 *** The function `make-frame-on-display' now works during a terminal
263 session, and `make-frame-on-tty' works during a graphical session.
264
265 *** The `window-system' variable has been made frame-local.
266
267 *** The new `initial-window-system' variable contains the
268 `window-system' value for the first frame.
269
270 THANKS
271 ------
272
273 The following is a (sadly incomplete) list of people who have
274 contributed to the project by testing, submitting patches, bug
275 reports, and suggestions. Thanks!
276
277 ARISAWA Akihiro <ari at mbf dot ocn dot ne dot jp>
278 Han Boetes <han at mijncomputer dot nl>
279 Robert J. Chassell <bob at rattlesnake dot com>
280 Romain Francoise <romain at orebokech dot com>
281 Ami Fischman <ami at fischman dot org>
282 Friedrich Delgado Friedrichs <friedel at nomaden dot org>
283 IRIE Tetsuya <irie at t dot email dot ne dot jp>
284 Yoshiaki Kasahara <kasahara at nc dot kyushu-u dot ac dot jp>
285 Jurej Kubelka <Juraj dot Kubelka at email dot cz>
286 David Lichteblau <david at lichteblau dot com>
287 Istvan Marko <mi-mtty at kismala dot com>
288 Ted Morse <morse at ciholas dot com>
289 Dan Nicolaescu <dann at ics dot uci dot edu>
290 Gergely Nagy <algernon at debian dot org>
291 Mark Plaksin <happy at mcplaksin dot org>
292 Francisco Borges <borges at let dot rug dot nl>
293 Frank Ruell <stoerte at dreamwarrior dot net>
294 Dan Waber <dwaber at logolalia dot com>
295 and many others.
296
297 Richard Stallman was kind enough to review an earlier version of my
298 patches.
299
300 CHANGELOG
301 ---------
302
303 See arch logs.
304
305 * * *
306
307 (The rest of this file consists of my development notes and as such it
308 is probably not very interesting for anyone else.)
309
310 THINGS TO DO
311 ------------
312
313 ** Hunt down display-related functions in frame.el and extend them all
314 to accept display ids.
315
316 ** Have a look at fatal_error_hook.
317
318 ** Check if we got term-setup-hook right.
319
320 ** make-frame does not correctly handle extra parameters in its
321 argument:
322
323 (frame-parameter (make-frame (list (cons 'foobar 42))) 'foobar)
324 => nil
325
326 (This is likely an error in the CVS trunk.)
327
328 ** Fix set-input-mode for multi-tty. It's a truly horrible interface;
329 what if we'd blow it up into several separate functions (with a
330 compatibility definition)?
331
332 ** Lisp-level stuff that needs to be updated for multi-tty:
333
334 - normal-erase-is-backspace-mode (simple.el) (rep. by Dan Waber)
335
336
337 ** The single-keyboard mode of MULTI_KBOARD is extremely confusing
338 sometimes; Emacs does not respond to stimuli from other keyboards.
339 At least a beep or a message would be important, if the single-mode
340 is still required to prevent interference. (Reported by Dan
341 Nicolaescu.) (Update: selecting a region with the mouse enables
342 single_kboard under X. This is very confusing.) Update:
343 After discussions with Richard, this will be resolved by having
344 locked displays warn the user to wait, and introducing a complex
345 protocol to remotely bail out of single-kboard mode by pressing C-g.
346
347 ** The terminal customization files in term/*.el tend to change global
348 parameters, which may confuse Emacs with multiple displays. Change
349 them to tweak only frame-local settings, if possible.
350
351 ** Dan Nicolaescu suggests that -nw should be added as an alias for -t
352 in emacsclient. Good idea. (Alas, implementing this is not
353 trivial, getopt_long does not seem to support two-letter ``short''
354 options. Patches are welcome.) :-)
355
356 ** Mark Plaksin suggests that emacsclient should accept the same
357 X-related command-line arguments as Emacs. Most of the X-related
358 argument-handling is done in Lisp, so this should be quite easy to
359 implement.
360
361 ** Gergely Nagy suggests that C-x # should only kill the current
362 frame, not any other emacsclient frame that may have the same file
363 opened for editing. I think I agree with him.
364
365 ** Miles Bader suggests that C-x C-c on an emacsclient frame should
366 only close the frame, not exit the entire Emacs session. Update:
367 see above for a function that does this. Maybe this should be the
368 new default?
369
370 ** Very strange bug: visible-bell does not work on secondary
371 terminals in xterm and konsole. The screen does flicker a bit,
372 but it's so quick it isn't noticable.
373
374 ** Clean up the frame-local variable system. I think it's ugly and
375 error-prone. But maybe I just haven't yet fully understood it.
376
377 ** Move baud_rate to struct display.
378
379 ** Implement support for starting an interactive Emacs session without
380 an initial frame. (The user would connect to it and open frames
381 later, with emacsclient.)
382
383 ** Fix Mac support (I can't do this entirely myself). Note that the
384 current state of Mac-specific source files in the multi-tty tree
385 are not useful; before starting work on Mac support, revert to
386 pristine, pre-multi-tty versions.
387
388 ** Fix W32 support (I can't do this entirely myself). Note that the
389 current state of W32-specific source files in the multi-tty tree
390 are not useful; before starting work on W32 support, revert to
391 pristine, pre-multi-tty versions.
392
393 ** Fix DOS support (I can't do this entirely myself). Note that the
394 current state of DOS-specific source files in the multi-tty tree
395 are not useful; before starting work on DOS support, revert to
396 pristine, pre-multi-tty versions.
397
398 ** Do a grep on XXX and ?? for more issues.
399
400 ** Understand Emacs's low-level input system (it's black magic) :-)
401 What exactly does interrupt_input do? I tried to disable it for
402 raw secondary tty support, but it does not seem to do anything
403 useful. (Update: Look again. X unconditionally enables this, maybe
404 that's why raw terminal support is broken again. I really do need
405 to understand input.)
406
407 ** Maybe standard-display-table should be display-local.
408
409 DIARY OF CHANGES
410 ----------------
411
412 (ex-TODO items with explanations.)
413
414 -- Introduce a new struct for terminal devices.
415
416 (Done, see struct tty_output. The list of members is not yet
417 complete.)
418
419 -- Change the bootstrap procedure to initialize tty_list.
420
421 (Done, but needs review.)
422
423 -- Change make-terminal-frame to support specifying another tty.
424
425 (Done, new frame parameters: `tty' and `tty-type'.)
426
427 -- Implement support for reading from multiple terminals.
428
429 (Done, read_avail_input tries to read from each terminal, until one
430 succeeds. MULTI_KBOARD is not used. Secondary terminals don't send
431 SIGIO!)
432
433 (Update: They do, now.)
434
435 (Update2: After enabling X, they don't.)
436
437 -- other-frame should cycle through the frames on the `current'
438 terminal only.
439
440 (Done, by trivially modifiying next_frame and prev_frame.)
441
442 -- Support different terminal sizes.
443
444 (Done, no problem.)
445
446 -- Make sure terminal resizes are handled gracefully. (Could be
447 problematic.)
448
449 (Done. We don't get automatic SIGWINCH for additional ttys,
450 though.)
451
452 -- Extend emacsclient to automatically open a new tty when it connects
453 to Emacs.
454
455 (Done. It's an ugly hack, needs more work.)
456
457 -- Redisplay must refresh the topmost frame on *all* terminals, not
458 just the initial terminal.
459
460 (Done, but introduced an ugly redisplay problems. Ugh.)
461
462 -- Fix redisplay problems.
463
464 (Done; it turned out that the entire Wcm structure must be moved
465 inside tty_output. Why didn't I catch this earlier?)
466
467 -- Provide a way for emacsclient to tell Emacs that the tty has been
468 resized.
469
470 (Done, simply forward the SIGWINCH signal.)
471
472 -- Each keypress should automatically select the frame corresponding
473 to the terminal that it was coming from. This means that Emacs
474 must know from which terminal the last keyboard event came from.
475
476 (Done, it was quite simple, the input event system already
477 supported multiple frames.)
478
479 -- Fix SIGIO issue with secondary terminals.
480
481 (Done, emacsclient signals Emacs after writing to the proxy pseudo
482 terminal. Note that this means that multi-tty does not work with
483 raw ttys!)
484
485 (Update: This is bullshit. There is a read_input_waiting function,
486 extend that somehow.)
487
488 (Update of update: The first update was not right either, extending
489 read_input_waiting was not necessary. Secondary ttys do seem to
490 send signals on input.)
491
492 (Update^3: Not any more.)
493
494 -- Make make-terminal-frame look up the `tty' and `tty-type' frame
495 parameters from the currently selected terminal before the global
496 default.
497
498 (Done.)
499
500 -- Put all cached terminal escape sequences into struct tty_output.
501 Currently, they are still stored in global variables, so we don't
502 really support multiple terminal types.
503
504 (Done. It was not fun.)
505
506 -- Implement sane error handling after initialization. (Currently
507 emacs exits if you specify a bad terminal type.) The helpful error
508 messages must still be provided when Emacs starts.
509
510 (Done.)
511
512 -- Implement terminal deletion, i.e., deleting local frames, closing
513 the tty device and restoring its previous state without exiting
514 Emacs.
515
516 (Done, but at the moment only called when an error happens during
517 initialization. There is a memory corruption error around this
518 somewhere.) (Update: now it is fully enabled.)
519
520 -- Implement automatic deletion of terminals when the last frame on
521 that terminal is closed.
522
523 (Done.)
524
525 -- Restore tty screen after closing the terminal.
526
527 (Done, we do the same as Emacs 21.2 for all terminals.)
528
529 -- 'TERM=dumb src/emacs' does not restore the terminal state.
530
531 (Done.)
532
533 -- C-g should work on secondary terminals.
534
535 (Done, but the binding is not configurable.)
536
537 -- Deal with SIGHUP in Emacs and in emacsclient. (After this, the
538 server-frames may be removed from server.el.)
539
540 (Done, nothing to do. It seems that Emacs does not receive SIGHUP
541 from secondary ttys, which is actually a good thing.) (Update: I
542 think it would be a bad idea to remove server-frames.)
543
544 -- Change emacsclient/server.el to support the -t argument better,
545 i.e. automatically close the socket when the frame is closed.
546
547 (Seems to be working OK.)
548
549 -- Fix mysterious memory corruption error with tty deletion. To
550 trigger it, try the following shell command:
551
552 while true; do TERM=no-such-terminal-definition emacsclient -h; done
553
554 Emacs usually dumps core after a few dozen iterations. (The bug
555 seems to be related to the xfreeing or bzeroing of
556 tty_output.Wcm. Maybe there are outside references to struct Wcm?
557 Why were these vars collected into a struct before multi-tty
558 support?)
559
560 (Done. Whew. It turned out that the problem had nothing to do
561 with hypothetical external references to Wcm, or any other
562 tty_output component; it was simply that delete_tty closed the
563 filehandles of secondary ttys twice, resulting in fclose doubly
564 freeing memory. Utterly trivial matter. I love the C's memory
565 management, it puts hair on your chest.)
566
567 -- Support raw secondary terminals. (Note that SIGIO works only on
568 the controlling terminal.) Hint: extend read_input_waiting for
569 multiple ttys and hopefully this will be fixed.
570
571 (Done, it seems to have been working already for some time. It
572 seems F_SETOWN does work, after all. Not sure what made it fail
573 earlier, but it seems to be fixed (there were several changes
574 around request_sigio, maybe one of them did it).
575 read_input_waiting is only used in sys_select, don't change
576 it.) (Update: After adding X support, it's broken again.)
577 (Update^2: No it isn't.) :-)
578
579 -- Find out why does Emacs abort when it wants to close its
580 controlling tty. Hint: chan_process[] array. Hey, maybe
581 noninterrupt-IO would work, too? Update: no, there is no process
582 for stdin/out.
583
584 (Done. Added add/delete_keyboard_wait_descriptor to
585 term_init/delete_tty. The hint was right, in a way.)
586
587 -- Issue with SIGIO: it needs to be disabled during redisplay. See if
588 fcntl kernel behaviour could be emulated by emacsclient.
589
590 (Done. Simply disabled the SIGIO emulation hack in emacsclient.)
591 (Update: it was added back.) (Update^2: and removed again.)
592
593 -- server.el: There are issues with saving files in buffers of closed
594 clients. Try editing a file with emacsclient -f, and (without
595 saving it) do a delete-frame. The frame is closed without
596 question, and a surprising confirmation prompt appears in another
597 frame.
598
599 (Done. delete-frame now asks for confirmation if it still has
600 pending buffers, and modified buffers don't seem to be deleted.)
601
602 -- emacsclient.el, server.el: Handle eval or file open errors when
603 doing -t.
604
605 (Done.)
606
607 -- Make parts of struct tty_output accessible from Lisp. The device
608 name and the type is sufficient.
609
610 (Done, see frame-tty-name and frame-tty-type.)
611
612 -- Export delete_tty to the Lisp environment, for emacsclient.
613
614 (Done, see delete-tty.)
615
616 -- Get rid of the accessor macros in termchar.h, or define macros for
617 all members.
618
619 (Done.)
620
621 -- Move device-specific parameters (like costs) commonly used by
622 device backends to a common, device-dependent structure.
623
624 (Done. See struct display_method in termhooks.h.)
625
626 -- Fix X support.
627
628 (Done. Well, it seems to be working.)
629
630 -- Allow simultaneous X and tty frames. (Handling input could be
631 tricky. Or maybe not.)
632
633 (Done. Allowed, that is. It is currently extremely unstable, to
634 the point of being unusable. The rif variable causes constant
635 core dumps. Handling input is indeed tricky.)
636
637 -- Rewrite multi-tty input in terms of MULTI_KBOARD.
638
639 (Done. In fact, there was no need to rewrite anything, I just
640 added a kboard member to tty_display_info, and initialized the
641 frame's kboard from there.)
642
643 -- Fix rif issue with X-tty combo sessions. IMHO the best thing to do
644 is to get rid of that global variable (and use the value value in
645 display_method, which is guaranteed to be correct).
646
647 (Done, did exactly that. Core dumps during combo sessions became
648 much rarer. In fact, I have not yet met a single one.)
649
650 -- Add multi-tty support to talk.el.
651
652 (Done.)
653
654 -- Clean up the source of emacsclient. It is a mess.
655
656 (Done, eliminated stupid proxy-pty kludge.)
657
658 -- Fix faces on tty frames during X-tty combo sessions. There is an
659 init_frame_faces call in init_sys_modes, see if there is a problem
660 with it.
661
662 (Done, there was a stupid mistake in
663 Ftty_supports_face_attributes_p. Colors are broken, though.)
664
665 -- C-x 5 2, C-x 5 o, C-x 5 0 on an emacsclient frame unexpectedly
666 exits emacsclient. This is a result of trying to be clever with
667 delete-frame-functions.
668
669 (Fixed, added delete-tty-after-functions, and changed server.el to
670 use it.)
671
672 -- Something with (maybe) multi-keyboard support broke function keys
673 and arrows on ttys during X+tty combo sessions. Debug this.
674
675 (I can't reproduce it, maybe the terminal type was wrong.)
676
677 -- Fix input from raw ttys (again).
678
679 (Now it seems to work all right.)
680
681 -- During an X-tty combo session, a (message "Hello") from a tty frame
682 goes to the X frame. Fix this.
683
684 (Done. There was a safeguard against writing to the initial
685 terminal frame during bootstrap which prevented echo_area_display
686 from working correctly on a tty frame during a combo session.)
687
688 -- If there are no frames on its controlling terminal, Emacs should
689 exit if the user presses C-c there.
690
691 (Done, as far as possible. See the SIGTERM comment in
692 interrupt_signal on why this seems to be impossible to solve this
693 in general.)
694
695 -- During an X session, Emacs seems to read from stdin. Also, Emacs
696 fails to start without a controlling tty.
697
698 (Fixed by replacing the troublesome termcap display with a dummy
699 bootstrap display during bootstrap.
700
701 -- Do tty output through struct display, like graphical display
702 backends.
703
704 (Done.)
705
706 -- Define an output_initial value for output_method for the initial
707 frame that is dumped with Emacs. Checking for this frame (e.g. in
708 cmd_error_internal) is ugly.
709
710 (Done, broking interactive temacs.)
711
712 -- The command `emacsclient -t -e '(delete-frame)'' fails to exit.
713
714 (Fixed.)
715
716 -- frame-creation-function should always create a frame that is on the
717 same display as the selected frame. Maybe frame-creation-function
718 should simply be removed and make-frame changed to do the right
719 thing.
720
721 (Done, with a nice hack. frame-creation-function is now frame-local.)
722
723 -- Fix C-g on raw ttys.
724
725 (Done. I disabled the interrupt/quit keys on all secondary
726 terminals, so Emacs sees C-g as normal input. This looks like an
727 overkill, because emacsclient has extra code to pass SIGINT to
728 Emacs, so C-g should remain the interrupt/quit key on emacsclient
729 frames. See the next entry why implementing this distinction would
730 be a bad idea.)
731
732 -- Make sure C-g goes to the right frame with ttys. This is hard, as
733 SIGINT doesn't have a tty parameter. :-(
734
735 (Done, the previous change fixes this as a pleasant side effect.)
736
737 -- I have seen a case when Emacs with multiple ttys fell into a loop
738 eating 100% of CPU time. Strace showed this loop:
739
740 getpid() = 30284
741 kill(30284, SIGIO) = 0
742 --- SIGIO (I/O possible) @ 0 (0) ---
743 ioctl(6, FIONREAD, [0]) = -1 EIO (Input/output error)
744 ioctl(5, FIONREAD, [0]) = -1 EIO (Input/output error)
745 ioctl(0, FIONREAD, [0]) = 0
746 sigreturn() = ? (mask now [])
747 gettimeofday({1072842297, 747760}, NULL) = 0
748 gettimeofday({1072842297, 747806}, NULL) = 0
749 select(9, [0 3 5 6], NULL, NULL, {0, 0}) = 2 (in [5 6], left {0, 0})
750 select(9, [0 3 5 6], NULL, NULL, {0, 0}) = 2 (in [5 6], left {0, 0})
751 gettimeofday({1072842297, 748245}, NULL) = 0
752
753 I have seen something similar with a single X frame, but have not
754 been able to reproduce it for debugging.
755
756 Update: This may have been caused by checking for nread != 0
757 instead of nread > 0 after calling read_socket_hook in
758 read_avail_input.
759
760 (Fixed. This was caused by unconditionally including stdin in
761 input_wait_mask in init_process. The select call in
762 wait_reading_process_input always returned immediately, indicating
763 that there is pending input from stdin, which nobody read.
764
765 Note that the above strace output seems to be an unrelated but
766 similar bug. I think that is now fixed.)
767
768 -- Exiting Emacs while there are emacsclient frames doesn't restore the
769 ttys to their default states.
770
771 (This seems to be fixed by some previous change.)
772
773 -- Allow opening an X session after -nw.
774
775 (Done.)
776
777 -- Fix color handling during tty+X combo sessions. (It seems that tty
778 sessions automatically convert the face colors to terminal colors
779 when the face is loaded. This conversion must happen instead on
780 the fly in write_glyphs, which might be problematic, as color
781 approximation is currently done in lisp (term/tty-colors.el).)
782 (Update: hm, colors seem to work fine if I start emacs with -nw and
783 then create an X frame. Maybe it's just a small buglet somewhere.)
784
785 (Seems to be fixed. The problem was in startup.el, it did not
786 initialize tty colors when the initial window system was
787 graphical.)
788
789 -- emacs -nw --eval '(y-or-n-p "Foobar")' segfaults. (Reported by
790 Romain Francoise)
791
792 (Fixed, there was a keyboard initialization problem.)
793
794 -- Fix interactive use of temacs. There are face-related SEGVs, most
795 likely because of changes in realize_default_face, realize_face.
796
797 (Fixed.)
798
799 -- Don't exit Emacs when the last X connection fails during a
800 multi-display session.
801
802 (Fixed.)
803
804 -- Dan Nicolaescu noticed that starting emacsclient on the same
805 terminal device that is the controlling tty of the Emacs process
806 gives unexpected results.
807
808 (Fixed.)
809
810 -- Istvan Marko reported that Emacs hang on ttys if it was started
811 from a shell script.
812
813 (Fixed. There was a bug in the multi-tty version of
814 narrow_foreground_group. tcsetpgrp blocks if it is called from a
815 process that is not in the same process group as the tty.)
816
817 -- emacsclient -t from an Emacs term buffer does not work, complains
818 about face problems. This can even lock up Emacs (if the recursive
819 frame sets single_kboard). Update: the face problems are caused by
820 bugs in term.el, not in multi-tty. The lockup is caused by
821 single_kboard mode, and is not easily resolvable. The best thing to
822 do is to simply refuse to create a tty frame of type `eterm'.
823
824 (Fixed, changed emacsclient to check for TERM=eterm. The face
825 complaints seem to be caused by bugs in term.el; they are not
826 related to multi-tty.)
827
828 -- Find out the best way to support suspending Emacs with multiple
829 ttys. My guess: disable it on the controlling tty, but from other
830 ttys pass it on to emacsclient somehow. (It is (I hope) trivial to
831 extend emacsclient to handle suspend/resume. A `kill -STOP' almost
832 works right now.)
833
834 (Done. I needed to play with signal handling and the server
835 protocol a bit to make emacsclient behave as a normal UNIX program
836 wrt foreground/background process groups.)
837
838 -- There is a flicker during the startup of `emacs -nw'; it's as if
839 the terminal is initialized, reset and then initialialized again.
840 Debug this. (Hint: narrow_foreground_group is called twice during
841 startup.)
842
843 (This is gone.)
844
845 -- Robert Chassell has found serious copy-paste bugs with the
846 multi-tty branch. There seem to be redisplay bugs while copying
847 from X to a terminal frame. Copying accented characters do not
848 work for me.
849
850 (Patch-124 should fix this, by changing the interprogram-*-function
851 variables to be frame-local, as suggested by Mark Plaksin
852 (thanks!). I think that the redisplay bugs are in fact not bugs,
853 but delays caused by single_kboard --> perhaps MULTI_KBOARD should
854 be removed.)
855
856 -- frame-creation-function was removed, which might be a bad idea.
857 Think up a compatible solution.
858
859 (It was an internal interface that may be changed when necessary.)
860
861 -- Change Lisp code not to (getenv "TERM"); use the `tty-type' frame
862 parameter or the frame-tty-type function instead. (M-x tags-search
863 "TERM" helps with this.) Update: Actually, all getenv invocations
864 should be checked for multi-tty compatibility, and an interface
865 must be implemented to get the remote client's environment.
866
867 (Done. Only getenv calls in lisp/term/*.el were changed; other
868 calls should be mostly left as they are.)
869
870 -- Add an elaborate mechanism for display-local variables. (There are
871 already a few of these; search for `terminal-local' in the Elisp
872 manual.)
873
874 (Not needed. Display-local variables could be emulated by
875 frame-local variables.)
876
877 -- Emacs assumes that all terminal frames have the same locale
878 settings as Emacs itself. This may lead to bogus results in a
879 multi-locale setup. (E.g., while logging in from a remote client
880 with a different locale.)
881 (Update after new bugreport by Friedrich Delgado Friedrichs:
882 (at least) the structs terminal_coding and keyboard_coding in
883 coding.c must be moved to struct display, and the Lisp interface
884 [set-]keyboard-coding-system must be adapted for the change.)
885
886 (Fixed. Emacs now uses the locale settings as seen by the
887 emacsclient process for server tty frames.)
888
889
890 -- Make `struct display' accessible to Lisp programs. Accessor functions:
891
892 (displayp OBJECT): Returns t if OBJECT is a display.
893 => Implemented as display-live-p.
894
895 (display-list): Returns list of currently active displays.
896 => Implemented.
897
898 (selected-display): Returns the display object of the selected frame.
899 => Not strictly necessary, but implemented anyway.
900
901 (frame-display FRAME): Returns the display object of FRAME.
902 => Implemented.
903
904 (display-frames DISPLAY): Returns a list of frames on DISPLAY.
905 => Already implemented, see frames-on-display-list.
906
907 (display-type DISPLAY): Returns the type of DISPLAY, as a
908 symbol. (See `framep'.)
909 => Implemented as display-live-p.
910
911 (display-device DISPLAY): Returns the name of the device that
912 DISPLAY uses, as a string. (E.g: "/dev/pts/16", or
913 ":0.0")
914 => Implemented as display-name.
915
916 etc.
917
918 See next issue why this is necessary.
919
920 (Update: The consensus on emacs-devel seems to be to do this via
921 integer identifiers. That's fine by me.)
922
923 (Done.)
924
925 -- The following needs to be supported:
926
927 $ emacsclient -t
928 C-z
929 $ emacsclient -t
930 (This fails now.)
931
932 The cleanest way to solve this is to allow multiple displays on the
933 same terminal device; each new emacsclient process should create
934 its own display. As displays are currently identified by their
935 device names, this is not possible until struct display becomes
936 accessible as a Lisp-level object.
937
938 (Done.)
939
940 ;;; arch-tag: 8da1619e-2e79-41a8-9ac9-a0485daad17d