Mercurial > emacs
view README.multi-tty @ 83114:0c11f1f77626
Merged in changes from CVS trunk.
Patches applied:
* miles@gnu.org--gnu-2004/emacs--cvs-trunk--0--patch-256
Update from CVS
* miles@gnu.org--gnu-2004/emacs--cvs-trunk--0--patch-257
{arch}/=cvs-sync-make-log: Use new features of tla-changelogs-to-log
git-archimport-id: lorentey@elte.hu--2004/emacs--multi-tty--0--patch-154
author | Karoly Lorentey <lorentey@elte.hu> |
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date | Wed, 28 Apr 2004 14:10:58 +0000 |
parents | fd147ed0d1b8 |
children | 7652900ea029 |
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-*- coding: utf-8; mode: text; -*- GOAL ---- The goal of this branch is to implement support for opening multiple, different tty devices and simultaneous X and tty frames from a single Emacs session. Some use cases: Emacs is notoriously slow at startup, so most people use another editor or emacsclient for quick editing jobs from the console. Unfortunately, emacsclient was very awkward to use, because it did not support opening a new Emacs frame on the current virtual console. Now, with multi-tty support, it can do that. (Emacsclient starts up faster than vi!) Some Gnus users (including me) run Gnus in an X frame in its own Emacs instance, which they typically leave running for weeks. It would be nice if they could connect to this instance from a remote ssh session and check their messages without opening a remote X frame or resorting to gnus-slave. WHO IS DOING IT --------------- I'm Károly Lőrentey. My address: lorentey@elte.hu. Comments, bug reports, suggestions and patches are welcome! Retrieving the latest version of the branch: tla register-archive lorentey@elte.hu--2004 http://lorentey.web.elte.hu/arch/2004/ tla get lorentey@elte.hu--2004/emacs--multi-tty <directory> (I use a recent arch development snapshot, but any of the released versions of arch will do fine, I think.) To update your source tree to the latest revision after the first checkout, simply use the following command: tla replay lorentey@elte.hu--2004/emacs--multi-tty--0 If you are interested, you can find more detailed information about Arch on http://wiki.gnuarch.org/. It's a wonderful source control system, I highly recommend it. If you don't have arch, the branch has a homepage from which you can download conventional patches against Emacs CVS HEAD: http://lorentey.web.elte.hu/project/emacs.html If you want to be notified of new revisions, sign up to the multi-tty@listbox.elte.hu mailing list by visiting the below homepage and following its instructions. https://listbox.elte.hu/mailman/listinfo/multi-tty Please note that the multi-tty mailing list is read-only, and is reserved for automatic commit messages. Discussion about the branch and bug reports should be sent directly to me (lorentey@elte.hu), or to the emacs-devel@gnu.org mailing list. (I hope to merge my branch into CVS HEAD reasonably soon, so I don't want to set up an elaborate development infrastructure for the multi-tty branch.) STATUS ------ The branch is now very stable and almost full-featured. I hope the major problems were fixed. (It still needs testing on other architectures, though.) Both multiple tty device support and simultaneous X and tty frame support works fine. Emacsclient has been extended to support opening new tty and X frames. It has been changed open new Emacs frames by default. Please let me know if you find any bugs in this branch. HOW TO COMPILE AND TEST ----------------------- To try out the multi-tty branch, compile and run the multi-tty branch with the following commands: find -name "*.elc" | xargs rm # Delete leftover stuff mkdir +build cd +build ../configure <your favourite options> make bootstrap src/emacs -nw # You can also try without -nw M-x server-start and then (from a shell prompt on another terminal) start emacsclient with lib-src/emacsclient /optional/file/names... or lib-src/emacsclient -t /optional/file/names... You'll hopefully have two fully working, independent frames on separate terminals. The new frame is closed automatically when you finish editing the specified files (C-x #), but delete-frame (C-x 5 0) also works. Of course, you can create frames on more than two tty devices. Creating new frames on the same tty with C-x 5 2 works, and they behave the same way as in previous Emacs versions. If you exit emacs, all terminals should be restored to their previous states. This is work in progress, and probably full of bugs. You should always run emacs from gdb, so that you'll have a live instance to debug if something goes wrong. Please send me your bug reports. I think the best way to use the new Emacs is to have it running inside a disconnected GNU screen session, and always use emacsclient for normal work. This way not a single keystroke of your work will be lost if the display device that you are using crashes, or the network connection times out, or whatever. As long as the server that runs your Emacs remains up, all your buffers remain exactly as they were before the crash, and you can continue working as if nothing had happened. (I had an extremely unstable X server for some time while I was developing these patches, and running Emacs this way has saved me a number of M-x recover-session invocations.) (I am thinking about introducing a --daemon option to get rid of the above screen dependency.) Problems: * Mac, Windows and DOS support is broken, probably doesn't even compile -- this will be solved later. * Only tested on my GNU/Linux box, Solaris 8 and FreeBSD. NEWS ---- For the NEWS file: ** Support for multiple terminal devices has been added. *** You can specify a terminal device (`tty' parameter) and a terminal type (`tty-type' parameter) to `make-terminal-frame'. *** You can test for the presence of multiple terminal support by testing for the `multi-tty' feature. *** Emacsclient has been extended to support opening a new terminal frame. Its behaviour has been changed to open a new Emacs frame by default. Use the -c option to get the old behavior of opening files in the currently selected Emacs frame. *** A make-frame-on-tty function has been added to make it easier to create frames on new terminals. *** New functions: frame-tty-name, frame-tty-type for accessing terminal parameters, and delete-tty for closing the terminal device. *** talk.el has been extended for multiple tty support. ** Support for simultaneous graphical and terminal frames has been added. *** The function `make-frame-on-display' now works during a terminal session, and `make-frame-on-tty' works during a graphical session. *** The `window-system' variable has been made frame-local. *** The new `initial-window-system' variable contains the `window-system' value for the first frame. THANKS ------ The following is an (incomplete) list of people who have contributed to the project by testing, bug reports, and suggestions. Thanks! Robert J. Chassell <bob at rattlesnake dot com> Romain Francoise <romain at orebokech dot com> Ami Fischman <ami at fischman dot org> Istvan Marko <mi-mtty ar kismala dot com> Dan Nicolaescu <dann at ics dot uci dot edu> Gergely Nagy <algernon at debian dot org> Mark Plaksin <happy at mcplaksin dot org> Francisco Borges <borges at let dot rug dot nl> Frank Ruell <stoerte at dreamwarrior dot net> and many others. Richard Stallman was kind enough to review an earlier version of my patches. CHANGELOG --------- See arch logs. THINGS TO DO ------------ ** frame-creation-function was removed, which might be a bad idea. Think up a compatible solution. ** make-frame does not correctly handle extra parameters in its argument: (frame-parameter (make-frame (list (cons 'foobar 42))) 'foobar) => nil (This is likely an error in the CVS trunk.) ** Fix set-input-mode for multi-tty. It's a truly horrible interface; what if we'd blow it up into several separate functions (with a compatibility definition)? ** Emacs assumes that all terminal frames have the same locale settings as Emacs itself. This may lead to bogus results in a multi-locale setup. (E.g., while logging in from a remote client with a different locale.) ** The single-keyboard mode of MULTI_KBOARD is extremely confusing sometimes; Emacs does not respond to stimuli from other keyboards. At least a beep or a message would be important, if the single-mode is still required to prevent interference. (Reported by Dan Nicolaescu.) (Update: selecting a region with the mouse enables single_kboard under X. This is very confusing.) ** Change Lisp code not to (getenv "TERM"); use the `tty-type' frame parameter or the frame-tty-type function instead. (M-x tags-search "TERM" helps with this.) Update: Actually, all getenv invocations should be checked for multi-tty compatibility, and an interface must be implemented to get the remote client's environment. ** The terminal customization files in term/*.el tend to change global parameters, which may confuse Emacs with multiple displays. Change them to tweak only frame-local settings, if possible. ** Dan Nicolaescu suggests that -nw should be added as an alias for -t in emacsclient. Good idea. (Alas, implementing this is not trivial, getopt_long does not seem to support two-letter ``short'' options. Patches are welcome.) :-) ** Mark Plaksin suggests that emacsclient should accept the same X-related command-line arguments as Emacs. Most of the X-related argument-handling is done in Lisp, so this should be quite easy to implement. ** Gergely Nagy suggests that C-x # should only kill the current frame, not any other emacsclient frame that may have the same file opened for editing. I think I agree with him. ** Miles Bader suggests that C-x C-c on an emacsclient frame should only close the frame, not exit the entire Emacs session. ** Make `struct display' accessible to Lisp programs. Accessor functions: (displayp OBJECT): Returns t if OBJECT is a display. (display-list): Returns list of currently active displays. (selected-display): Returns the display object of the selected frame. (frame-display FRAME): Returns the display object of FRAME. (display-frames DISPLAY): Returns a list of frames on DISPLAY. (display-type DISPLAY): Returns the type of DISPLAY, as a symbol. (See `framep'.) (display-device DISPLAY): Returns the name of the device that DISPLAY uses, as a string. (E.g: "/dev/pts/16", or ":0.0") etc. See next issue why this is necessary. ** The following needs to be supported: $ emacsclient -t C-z $ emacsclient -t (This fails now.) The cleanest way to solve this is to allow multiple displays on the same terminal device; each new emacsclient process should create its own display. As displays are currently identified by their device names, this is not possible until struct display becomes accessible as a Lisp-level object. ** Add an elaborate mechanism for display-local variables. (There are already a few of these; search for `terminal-local' in the Elisp manual.) ** Very strange bug: visible-bell does not work on secondary terminals in xterm and konsole. The screen does flicker a bit, but it's so quick it isn't noticable. ** Clean up the frame-local variable system. I think it's ugly and error-prone. But maybe I just haven't yet fully understood it. ** Move baud_rate to struct display. ** Implement support for starting an interactive Emacs session without an initial frame. (The user would connect to it and open frames later, with emacsclient.) ** Fix Mac support (I can't do this myself). Note that the current state of Mac-specific source files in the multi-tty tree are not useful; before starting work on Mac support, revert to pristine, pre-multi-tty versions. ** Fix W32 support (I can't do this myself). Note that the current state of W32-specific source files in the multi-tty tree are not useful; before starting work on W32 support, revert to pristine, pre-multi-tty versions. ** Fix DOS support (I can't do this myself). Note that the current state of DOS-specific source files in the multi-tty tree are not useful; before starting work on DOS support, revert to pristine, pre-multi-tty versions. ** Do a grep on XXX and ?? for more issues. ** Understand Emacs's low-level input system (it's black magic) :-) What exactly does interrupt_input do? I tried to disable it for raw secondary tty support, but it does not seem to do anything useful. (Update: Look again. X unconditionally enables this, maybe that's why raw terminal support is broken again. I really do need to understand input.) ** Maybe standard-display-table should be display-local. DIARY OF CHANGES ---------------- (ex-TODO items with explanations.) -- Introduce a new struct for terminal devices. (Done, see struct tty_output. The list of members is not yet complete.) -- Change the bootstrap procedure to initialize tty_list. (Done, but needs review.) -- Change make-terminal-frame to support specifying another tty. (Done, new frame parameters: `tty' and `tty-type'.) -- Implement support for reading from multiple terminals. (Done, read_avail_input tries to read from each terminal, until one succeeds. MULTI_KBOARD is not used. Secondary terminals don't send SIGIO!) (Update: They do, now.) (Update2: After enabling X, they don't.) -- other-frame should cycle through the frames on the `current' terminal only. (Done, by trivially modifiying next_frame and prev_frame.) -- Support different terminal sizes. (Done, no problem.) -- Make sure terminal resizes are handled gracefully. (Could be problematic.) (Done. We don't get automatic SIGWINCH for additional ttys, though.) -- Extend emacsclient to automatically open a new tty when it connects to Emacs. (Done. It's an ugly hack, needs more work.) -- Redisplay must refresh the topmost frame on *all* terminals, not just the initial terminal. (Done, but introduced an ugly redisplay problems. Ugh.) -- Fix redisplay problems. (Done; it turned out that the entire Wcm structure must be moved inside tty_output. Why didn't I catch this earlier?) -- Provide a way for emacsclient to tell Emacs that the tty has been resized. (Done, simply forward the SIGWINCH signal.) -- Each keypress should automatically select the frame corresponding to the terminal that it was coming from. This means that Emacs must know from which terminal the last keyboard event came from. (Done, it was quite simple, the input event system already supported multiple frames.) -- Fix SIGIO issue with secondary terminals. (Done, emacsclient signals Emacs after writing to the proxy pseudo terminal. Note that this means that multi-tty does not work with raw ttys!) (Update: This is bullshit. There is a read_input_waiting function, extend that somehow.) (Update of update: The first update was not right either, extending read_input_waiting was not necessary. Secondary ttys do seem to send signals on input.) (Update^3: Not any more.) -- Make make-terminal-frame look up the `tty' and `tty-type' frame parameters from the currently selected terminal before the global default. (Done.) -- Put all cached terminal escape sequences into struct tty_output. Currently, they are still stored in global variables, so we don't really support multiple terminal types. (Done. It was not fun.) -- Implement sane error handling after initialization. (Currently emacs exits if you specify a bad terminal type.) The helpful error messages must still be provided when Emacs starts. (Done.) -- Implement terminal deletion, i.e., deleting local frames, closing the tty device and restoring its previous state without exiting Emacs. (Done, but at the moment only called when an error happens during initialization. There is a memory corruption error around this somewhere.) (Update: now it is fully enabled.) -- Implement automatic deletion of terminals when the last frame on that terminal is closed. (Done.) -- Restore tty screen after closing the terminal. (Done, we do the same as Emacs 21.2 for all terminals.) -- 'TERM=dumb src/emacs' does not restore the terminal state. (Done.) -- C-g should work on secondary terminals. (Done, but the binding is not configurable.) -- Deal with SIGHUP in Emacs and in emacsclient. (After this, the server-frames may be removed from server.el.) (Done, nothing to do. It seems that Emacs does not receive SIGHUP from secondary ttys, which is actually a good thing.) (Update: I think it would be a bad idea to remove server-frames.) -- Change emacsclient/server.el to support the -t argument better, i.e. automatically close the socket when the frame is closed. (Seems to be working OK.) -- Fix mysterious memory corruption error with tty deletion. To trigger it, try the following shell command: while true; do TERM=no-such-terminal-definition emacsclient -h; done Emacs usually dumps core after a few dozen iterations. (The bug seems to be related to the xfreeing or bzeroing of tty_output.Wcm. Maybe there are outside references to struct Wcm? Why were these vars collected into a struct before multi-tty support?) (Done. Whew. It turned out that the problem had nothing to do with hypothetical external references to Wcm, or any other tty_output component; it was simply that delete_tty closed the filehandles of secondary ttys twice, resulting in fclose doubly freeing memory. Utterly trivial matter. I love the C's memory management, it puts hair on your chest.) -- Support raw secondary terminals. (Note that SIGIO works only on the controlling terminal.) Hint: extend read_input_waiting for multiple ttys and hopefully this will be fixed. (Done, it seems to have been working already for some time. It seems F_SETOWN does work, after all. Not sure what made it fail earlier, but it seems to be fixed (there were several changes around request_sigio, maybe one of them did it). read_input_waiting is only used in sys_select, don't change it.) (Update: After adding X support, it's broken again.) (Update^2: No it isn't.) :-) -- Find out why does Emacs abort when it wants to close its controlling tty. Hint: chan_process[] array. Hey, maybe noninterrupt-IO would work, too? Update: no, there is no process for stdin/out. (Done. Added add/delete_keyboard_wait_descriptor to term_init/delete_tty. The hint was right, in a way.) -- Issue with SIGIO: it needs to be disabled during redisplay. See if fcntl kernel behaviour could be emulated by emacsclient. (Done. Simply disabled the SIGIO emulation hack in emacsclient.) (Update: it was added back.) (Update^2: and removed again.) -- server.el: There are issues with saving files in buffers of closed clients. Try editing a file with emacsclient -f, and (without saving it) do a delete-frame. The frame is closed without question, and a surprising confirmation prompt appears in another frame. (Done. delete-frame now asks for confirmation if it still has pending buffers, and modified buffers don't seem to be deleted.) -- emacsclient.el, server.el: Handle eval or file open errors when doing -t. (Done.) -- Make parts of struct tty_output accessible from Lisp. The device name and the type is sufficient. (Done, see frame-tty-name and frame-tty-type.) -- Export delete_tty to the Lisp environment, for emacsclient. (Done, see delete-tty.) -- Get rid of the accessor macros in termchar.h, or define macros for all members. (Done.) -- Move device-specific parameters (like costs) commonly used by device backends to a common, device-dependent structure. (Done. See struct display_method in termhooks.h.) -- Fix X support. (Done. Well, it seems to be working.) -- Allow simultaneous X and tty frames. (Handling input could be tricky. Or maybe not.) (Done. Allowed, that is. It is currently extremely unstable, to the point of being unusable. The rif variable causes constant core dumps. Handling input is indeed tricky.) -- Rewrite multi-tty input in terms of MULTI_KBOARD. (Done. In fact, there was no need to rewrite anything, I just added a kboard member to tty_display_info, and initialized the frame's kboard from there.) -- Fix rif issue with X-tty combo sessions. IMHO the best thing to do is to get rid of that global variable (and use the value value in display_method, which is guaranteed to be correct). (Done, did exactly that. Core dumps during combo sessions became much rarer. In fact, I have not yet met a single one.) -- Add multi-tty support to talk.el. (Done.) -- Clean up the source of emacsclient. It is a mess. (Done, eliminated stupid proxy-pty kludge.) -- Fix faces on tty frames during X-tty combo sessions. There is an init_frame_faces call in init_sys_modes, see if there is a problem with it. (Done, there was a stupid mistake in Ftty_supports_face_attributes_p. Colors are broken, though.) -- C-x 5 2, C-x 5 o, C-x 5 0 on an emacsclient frame unexpectedly exits emacsclient. This is a result of trying to be clever with delete-frame-functions. (Fixed, added delete-tty-after-functions, and changed server.el to use it.) -- Something with (maybe) multi-keyboard support broke function keys and arrows on ttys during X+tty combo sessions. Debug this. (I can't reproduce it, maybe the terminal type was wrong.) -- Fix input from raw ttys (again). (Now it seems to work all right.) -- During an X-tty combo session, a (message "Hello") from a tty frame goes to the X frame. Fix this. (Done. There was a safeguard against writing to the initial terminal frame during bootstrap which prevented echo_area_display from working correctly on a tty frame during a combo session.) -- If there are no frames on its controlling terminal, Emacs should exit if the user presses C-c there. (Done, as far as possible. See the SIGTERM comment in interrupt_signal on why this seems to be impossible to solve this in general.) -- During an X session, Emacs seems to read from stdin. Also, Emacs fails to start without a controlling tty. (Fixed by replacing the troublesome termcap display with a dummy bootstrap display during bootstrap. -- Do tty output through struct display, like graphical display backends. (Done.) -- Define an output_initial value for output_method for the initial frame that is dumped with Emacs. Checking for this frame (e.g. in cmd_error_internal) is ugly. (Done, broking interactive temacs.) -- The command `emacsclient -t -e '(delete-frame)'' fails to exit. (Fixed.) -- frame-creation-function should always create a frame that is on the same display as the selected frame. Maybe frame-creation-function should simply be removed and make-frame changed to do the right thing. (Done, with a nice hack. frame-creation-function is now frame-local.) -- Fix C-g on raw ttys. (Done. I disabled the interrupt/quit keys on all secondary terminals, so Emacs sees C-g as normal input. This looks like an overkill, because emacsclient has extra code to pass SIGINT to Emacs, so C-g should remain the interrupt/quit key on emacsclient frames. See the next entry why implementing this distinction would be a bad idea.) -- Make sure C-g goes to the right frame with ttys. This is hard, as SIGINT doesn't have a tty parameter. :-( (Done, the previous change fixes this as a pleasant side effect.) -- I have seen a case when Emacs with multiple ttys fell into a loop eating 100% of CPU time. Strace showed this loop: getpid() = 30284 kill(30284, SIGIO) = 0 --- SIGIO (I/O possible) @ 0 (0) --- ioctl(6, FIONREAD, [0]) = -1 EIO (Input/output error) ioctl(5, FIONREAD, [0]) = -1 EIO (Input/output error) ioctl(0, FIONREAD, [0]) = 0 sigreturn() = ? (mask now []) gettimeofday({1072842297, 747760}, NULL) = 0 gettimeofday({1072842297, 747806}, NULL) = 0 select(9, [0 3 5 6], NULL, NULL, {0, 0}) = 2 (in [5 6], left {0, 0}) select(9, [0 3 5 6], NULL, NULL, {0, 0}) = 2 (in [5 6], left {0, 0}) gettimeofday({1072842297, 748245}, NULL) = 0 I have seen something similar with a single X frame, but have not been able to reproduce it for debugging. Update: This may have been caused by checking for nread != 0 instead of nread > 0 after calling read_socket_hook in read_avail_input. (Fixed. This was caused by unconditionally including stdin in input_wait_mask in init_process. The select call in wait_reading_process_input always returned immediately, indicating that there is pending input from stdin, which nobody read. Note that the above strace output seems to be an unrelated but similar bug. I think that is now fixed.) -- Exiting Emacs while there are emacsclient frames doesn't restore the ttys to their default states. (This seems to be fixed by some previous change.) -- Allow opening an X session after -nw. (Done.) -- Fix color handling during tty+X combo sessions. (It seems that tty sessions automatically convert the face colors to terminal colors when the face is loaded. This conversion must happen instead on the fly in write_glyphs, which might be problematic, as color approximation is currently done in lisp (term/tty-colors.el).) (Update: hm, colors seem to work fine if I start emacs with -nw and then create an X frame. Maybe it's just a small buglet somewhere.) (Seems to be fixed. The problem was in startup.el, it did not initialize tty colors when the initial window system was graphical.) -- emacs -nw --eval '(y-or-n-p "Foobar")' segfaults. (Reported by Romain Francoise) (Fixed, there was a keyboard initialization problem.) -- Fix interactive use of temacs. There are face-related SEGVs, most likely because of changes in realize_default_face, realize_face. (Fixed.) -- Don't exit Emacs when the last X connection fails during a multi-display session. (Fixed.) -- Dan Nicolaescu noticed that starting emacsclient on the same terminal device that is the controlling tty of the Emacs process gives unexpected results. (Fixed.) -- Istvan Marko reported that Emacs hang on ttys if it was started from a shell script. (Fixed. There was a bug in the multi-tty version of narrow_foreground_group. tcsetpgrp blocks if it is called from a process that is not in the same process group as the tty.) -- emacsclient -t from an Emacs term buffer does not work, complains about face problems. This can even lock up Emacs (if the recursive frame sets single_kboard). Update: the face problems are caused by bugs in term.el, not in multi-tty. The lockup is caused by single_kboard mode, and is not easily resolvable. The best thing to do is to simply refuse to create a tty frame of type `eterm'. (Fixed, changed emacsclient to check for TERM=eterm. The face complaints seem to be caused by bugs in term.el; they are not related to multi-tty.) -- Find out the best way to support suspending Emacs with multiple ttys. My guess: disable it on the controlling tty, but from other ttys pass it on to emacsclient somehow. (It is (I hope) trivial to extend emacsclient to handle suspend/resume. A `kill -STOP' almost works right now.) (Done. I needed to play with signal handling and the server protocol a bit to make emacsclient behave as a normal UNIX program wrt foreground/background process groups.) -- There is a flicker during the startup of `emacs -nw'; it's as if the terminal is initialized, reset and then initialialized again. Debug this. (Hint: narrow_foreground_group is called twice during startup.) (This is gone.) -- Robert Chassell has found serious copy-paste bugs with the multi-tty branch. There seem to be redisplay bugs while copying from X to a terminal frame. Copying accented characters do not work for me. (Patch-124 should fix this, by changing the interprogram-*-function variables to be frame-local, as suggested by Mark Plaksin (thanks!). I think that the redisplay bugs are in fact not bugs, but delays caused by single_kboard --> perhaps MULTI_KBOARD should be removed.) ;;; arch-tag: 8da1619e-2e79-41a8-9ac9-a0485daad17d