Subject: Re: bug#3963: 23.0.94; Emacs on nextstep/Mac OS X should handle mailto: URLs

From: Harald Hanche-Olsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:17:35 -0500 (CDT)

+ Teemu Likonen <[email-masked]>:

> I does not require emacsclient. The regular emacs executable has --eval
> option too. On that web page there's a shell script. The idea is to
> configure it to be the mail client program.

But firefox, on the mac, cannot be configured to use an arbitrary
program or shell script as the mail client. It wants a full-blown Mac
application, which it can activate and then send an Apple event to.
Or have I misunderstood something?

> For example, I have configured my Firefox and my KDE
> desktop environment to use that shell script as mail client program.
> Works nicely.

But I am not talking about KDE. I am talking about Mac OS X and its
native GUI.

Now I have been wasting time digging around in ns-win.el and
term/nsterm.m to try to figure out how all this works, but I am not
familiar with OS X internals nor can I read Objective C, so it all
makes my head spin.

But I can figure out some bits: If I run open -a emacs FILENAME in a
terminal, this apparently results in an event handled by [NXapp run]
and gets transferred into an <ns-open-file-line> event which is
handled by the usual emacs event loop. Similarly, if I use the service
menu in another app to ask emacs to do something, a
<ns-spi-service-call> event results. But run open -a emacs
mailto:[email-masked], and no such translation happens.

- Harald