Thunderbird and XEmacs 21.4.22

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Rodney Sparapani writes:

 > Well, what's traditional? 

vi, nano, pico, xpdf ....  (I'm pretty sure xpdf now handles URLs,
though.)

 > Like I said in my other post (did you get that),

Yeah, I saw it.

 > OpenOffice handles what thunderbird sent which was actually
 > file:///home/rsparapa/Z.mtx

OpenOffice is most definitely nontraditional.

 > I agree that it is very complicated.  But, I figured the simple solution 
 > was to get XEmacs to understand requests like file:///home/rsparapa/Z.mtx

XEmacs *does* understand those, via the function url-retrieve.
However, changing the meaning of command-line arguments
program means is a recipe for trouble.  Cf. the "Slow startup" thread,
where Apple has gone and broken the DISPLAY variable.  Trying to guess
what is intended by these programs is a difficult problem.

 > So, I was crafting an email with thunderbird to which I attached a text 
 > file.
 > But, then I wanted to view/edit that file.  So, I double-clicked on it and
 > it asked me which application that I wanted to open it with.  I chose 
 > /usr/local/bin/xemacs which is 21.4.22.  If I had picked OpenOffice, 
 > then everything works.  But, for text files, there is nothing like
 > XEmacs:o)

There is probably a way to tell Thunderbird that it's talking to a
traditional Unix program that expects to receive a file, not an URL.
Traditionally in mimecap files that format would be

text/plain /usr/local/bin/xemacs %s

but I wouldn't be surprised if Thunderbird has usurped that format to
mean URL, not file.

I can't think of any quick hacks to make XEmacs do the right thing
with an URL from the command line.  I'll try later in the week.