I love the FireFox plugin It’s All Text – it lets me edit wiki pages, webmail, etc. in my beloved editor of Emacs and automatically refreshes the text field in FF with my new text.  But I recently moved from using NTEmacs to Cygwin’s version, and things simply stopped working.  And it made sense — Cygwin is just a layer on top of Windows, but it uses Unix-like paths, while It’s All Text would, naturally, use Windows-style paths.

I put up with this for a few months, mostly because I didn’t want to spend the cycles on figuring this out.  I did spend a few, and they were all pretty much worthless. I’m not sure why — the idea wasn’t hard, but it seemed to be.

A while back I decided to put some dedicated cycles to this.  I found this comment from the It’s All Text developer on his blog — it didn’t work , but it was a start.   I took his work and built my own version.  I was trying to do it with a one-script solution but seeing his I knew I needed two: one batch file and then one shell script.  After some experimenting,

The following batch script should be left alone.  It sets up the Cygwin environment, and then uses Cygwin’s “run” command to start a bash shell, when then runs our shell script.  The “%~f1″ is actually the most important component here.  It is a batch file command that says to give the full path of the first argument. Of course, that assumes that the first argument is a file but considering we are using this with It’s All Text, we are safe with that assumption.

@echo off
SET DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:0.0
SET CYGWIN_ROOT=c:\cygwin
SET RUN=%CYGWIN_ROOT%\bin\run -p /usr/X11R6/bin
SET PATH=.;%CYGWIN_ROOT%\bin;%CYGWIN_ROOT%\usr\X11R6\bin;%PATH%
SET XAPPLRESDIR=/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults
SET XCMSDB=/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/Xcms.txt
SET XKEYSYMDB=/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XKeysymDB
SET XNLSPATH=/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale

rem the %~f1 is the full path name of the argument given to the script.
%CYGWIN_ROOT%/bin/run.exe c:/cygwin/bin/bash.exe  /cygdrive/h/bin/text.sh %~f1

The following is our shell script, which we referenced as “text.sh” above. It’s much simpler — it converts the Windows path it was given to a Unix path and then calls our editor (“emacsclient” in my case, which will load up the file in the current Emacs instance).  You maybe thinking that I could have just was well as done this in the batch file above — and, you are right, I could have ran the editor but I had to also convert the file’s path first.  That is really why we need two scripts — using a shell script is the only way I could find that would let me use the cygpath command in a reliable way.  Note that I used “$*” at the path name — that will give all the arguments, which I need because there are spaces in the full path name (“$~f1″ above).

#!/bin/sh

/usr/bin/emacsclient "`cygpath "$*"`"

So not easy, but it’s possible. Of course, I made it a lot easier now for everyone else!