Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!hao!gatech!bloom-beacon!oberon!cit-vax!ucla-cs!sdcrdcf!burdvax!bpa!sjuvax!tmoody
From: tmoody@sjuvax.UUCP (T. Moody)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Integrating micro-spell
Message-ID: <1173@sjuvax.UUCP>
Date: 17 Feb 88 14:12:22 GMT
Reply-To: tmoody@sjuvax.UUCP (T. Moody)
Organization: St. Joseph's University, Phila. PA.
Lines: 33


This is in fact a question about the micro-emacs 3.9e macro language...

Recently, I downloaded micro-spell 1.0 from the "Programmer's Room" BBS
in Indiana.  One of the files is SCAN.CMD, and its purpose is to tell
emacs how to scan through the unrecognized words in a file and prompt
the user for the appopriate action.  So, if you type "spell -e foo" at
the DOS prompt, SPELL.EXE checks foo for unrecognized words, fires up
emacs and runs the SCAN macro.

What I want to do is to run micro-spell from within emacs, on a file
that I am editing.  One way to do this, of course, is to use
shell-command to run micro-spell and create another copy of emacs in
RAM.  This is an extravagant waste of memory on a PC.

A better way would be to have a shell-command to run SPELL.EXE on the
current file, and then invoke the SCAN macro, and then quit back to
emacs.  But I can't get it to work that way.  I tried, for example,
using &cat to create the command line "spell foo" to use with the
shell-command sequence.  All this does is to create a new DOS shell,
from which I must exit back into emacs.  Here is the macro fragment:

set %comline &cat "spell " $cfname
shell-command @%comline
execute-file "scan.cmd"

Any ideas about how I might get this to work.  In particular, is there a
simpler way to put a shell-command with a context-dependent argument in
a macro?

-- 
Todd Moody * {allegra|astrovax|bpa|burdvax}!sjuvax!tmoody * SJU Phil. Dept.
    "The wind is not moving.  The flag is not moving.  Mind is moving."