Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!ucbvax!dewey.soe.berkeley.edu!oster
From: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Emacs and rn
Message-ID: <26282@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 30 Sep 88 12:06:29 GMT
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster)
Organization: School of Education, UC-Berkeley
Lines: 36


Let me know if I am out to lunch on this one. 

Background:
The news reader I use is "rn".
When I want to reply to a posting, I give a command to "rn". "rn" copies
an appropriate header into a temporary file, and hands the file to an
editor program it gets from an environment variable. It sleeps until the
editor exits, then uses the contents of the temporary file as the message
to send.

The Problem:
The problem is I want to use emacs as my editor, but I don't like waiting
for a new copy of emacs to be created.

What I want:
I want (1) a short C program that opens a pseudotty (or a named pipe.),
writes its first argument (a filename) to that output, flushes the output,
and sleeps. When it recieves an acknowledgment, it exits.

(2) an emacs macro to listen on such a pseudotty (or named pipe.) until
it sees a filename, then read it into an editor buffer. The editor buffer
should have a "Done" command bound to a control key sequence that 
(a) writes the file out,
(b) sends the acknowledgment to the C program described in (1).
(c) closes the buffer.

I need the whole thing to work throught the vt100 emulator I'm using to 
talk to unix.  This will let me keep one emacs process running all the time,
and send files to it from outside, whenever I want.

Does anyone have such a beast?

--- David Phillip Oster            --When you asked me to live in sin with you
Arpa: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --I didn't know you meant sloth.
Uucp: {uwvax,decvax,ihnp4}!ucbvax!oster%dewey.soe.berkeley.edu