Re: resetting xemacs' idea of home directory

Another choice is to use a new env var set the way you want. Set A to /some/path and then open file $A/thesis.

(Works in emacs 20.7.1 for Windows).

And, FWIW, no reason not to have an A, B, C, D, ... or however many different path shortcuts you might need.

Tim Connors wrote:

> I want to reset a running xemacs' idea of where my $HOME directory is (I
> want to temporarily work in a different filesystem with my main xemacs
> process) so that when I open a file in ~/thesis/..., it goes to
> <directory>/thesis/....
>
> (setenv "HOME" ...) didn't do what I was hoping it would do (obviously it
> would for subshells). Is there a way?

Not easily. XEmacs caches the result of getenv("HOME"), and there
isn't any way to un-cache it from lisp. Also, the variable which
stores the home directory isn't a lisp variable, so you can't just set
or bind it.

You could modify e.g. find-file-noselect (e.g. with defadvice) to
detect a filename beginning with "~/" and substitute your alternate
home directory.

You could even intercept expand-file-name if you want the change to
affect everything. However, that will get a bit messy, as
expand-file-name is a built-in function, so you can't use defadvice,
and if you want to override the definition, you'll need to store
(symbol-function 'expand-file-name) somewhere so that you can call it
from your wrapper.

--
Glynn Clements <glynn@gclements.plus.com>

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