2

I am trying to make Windows open text files in Emacs, which I have installed under Cygwin. I have followed these instructions: and created a bat file like this:

@echo off
chdir C:\LocalApp\cygwin\bin
start mintty.exe /usr/bin/emacs-X11.exe %1

It does launch Emacs when I double-click on the file name in Windows Explorer, but I have two problems:

  1. Emacs runs in console mode not in window mode (and I have XWin running).

  2. It shows an empty buffer instead of the file content (I suspect this is a path issue, but I could not find a way to insert cygpath in the .bat script and make it work).

Any idea? Thanks.

Community
  • 1
point618
  • 475

1 Answers1

1

1) Emacs most likely starts in console mode because no DISPLAY variable is set; set that environment variable, with a value which points to an X server able to accept clients, and you should find better results. You can also pass a display identifier via the --display or -d command line option to Emacs, which I'll do in the following example because I don't know how to set env vars in Windows batch files:

@echo off
chdir c:\LocalApp\cygwin\bin
start mintty.exe /usr/bin/emacs-X11.exe --display 127.0.0.1:0 %1

If necessary, which it probably isn't, replace the --display value given here with something more suited for your X server configuration.

This will probably still display a console window, since you're using the Windows start command to spawn a mintty process which you then ask to launch Emacs. What you can do instead is use the Cygwin run command, which launches a given binary without a console window, and eliminate the redundant mintty process:

@echo off
chdir c:\LocalApp\cygwin\bin
run /usr/bin/emacs-X11.exe --display 127.0.0.1:0 %1

2) Finally, you need to find a way to pass the file path to Emacs in a form it can understand. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure command interpolation is impossible in Windows batch language, so you can't do the equivalent of e.g. Bash $(cygpath -au %1). Perhaps your best option might be to have the Windows batch file run Cygwin Bash, passing the filename argument to a script which translates it and launches Emacs. For example, your batch file might be

@echo off
chdir C:\LocalApp\cygwin\bin
run sh /path/to/launch-emacs.sh %1

And then, in launch-emacs.sh, you might have something like:

#!/bin/sh
cd /cygdrive/c/LocalApp/cygwin/bin
/usr/bin/emacs-X11 --display 127.0.0.1:0 `cygpath -au $1`

which translates the path via cygpath, then hands it off to Emacs, along with a display identifier as described above.

My only Windows box is at home, so I haven't had opportunity to test these exact scripts, but I do some pretty similar things with Emacs on that machine; assuming your X server is properly configured, the stuff in 1) will almost certainly work, and the rest should be OK modulo a superfluous console window about which you may or may not care. Let me know how it goes, and I'll see what further help I can offer.

Aaron Miller
  • 10,087