[Conkeror] Getting informations about the current buffer in interactive commands

[Sebastian Rose]

Jeremy Maitin-Shepard <jeremy at jeremyms.com> writes:
>> Only one protocol has to be registered to use an arbitrary number of
>> sub-protocols to do anything you want.
>
>> Before, we had the remember and bookmark stuff in org-mode/contrib,
>> which is now included in org-protocol.el. For each of those, a protocol
>> had to be registered with every browser (MS is easier here), and a shell
>> script in different flavours was needed (Bash/DOS/...).
>
> In the context of interacting with existing software that you don't want
> to or is hard to modify, I can see how it would be useful.  In the
> context of Conkeror, there are no limitations about how external
> programs can be called, so there is no advantage to using a "URL-like"
> command-line syntax.

That's nice - I have it installed Conkeror but I have not used it so
far. I don't have the slightest clue about it's internals. Maybe I'll
start using it one day...



>> org-protocol/emacsclient doesn't look like the best way to do that
>> stuff, but what `infrastructure' does emacs provide?
>
> You can invoke arbitrary Elisp code via emacsclient -e, so in
> particular.  That is the infrastructure that Emacs provides.  


Yes, I know, but that's not possible from FF or Opera, IE .... They
distinguish file types and actions through protocols. So do operating
systems/Desktop environments/modern applications. The sad thing is,
emacsclient still does not even parse a `file:///home/user/xy.txt' URL
as expected. And I think it will still not do so in 2012.

The elisp approach was, what we had.

  Protocol/bookmark => shell script generates elisp and calls
  emacsclient -e => emacs

Which means a user would have to know Bash and elisp. No need for that
anymore. Also, there was some elisp needed in emacs to do the right
thing.

Now all those protocol handlers boil down to a few lines of code, since
all the parsing is done for them in org-protocol. Before we had several
elisp files, all implementing the same thing over and over again.

It's a step in the right direction, I believe.


  Sebastian