Re: Calling external formfield editor from slave elinks process

On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 01:27:26PM +0200, Klaus Knopper wrote:
> Dear list,
> 
> I would like to be able to call an external editor for textarea filds in
> a web form, but not only from the "master" terminal.
> 
> The following is an excerpt from
> elinks-0.12-20080414/src/viewer/text/textarea.c:
> 
> /** We use some evil hacking in order to make external textarea editor working.
>  * We need to have some way how to be notified that the editor finished and we
>  * should reload content of the textarea.  So we use global variable
>  * @c textarea_editor as a flag whether we have one running, and if we have, we
>  * just call textarea_edit(1, ...).  Then we recover our state from static
>  * variables, reload content of textarea back from file and clean up.
>  *
>  * Unfortunately, we can't support calling of editor from non-master links
>  * session, as it would be extremely ugly to hack (you would have to transfer
>  * the content of it back to master somehow, add special flags for not deleting
>  * of 'delete' etc) and I'm not going to do that now. Inter-links communication
>  * *NEEDS* rewrite, as it looks just like quick messy hack now. --pasky */
> 
> [...]
>         if (op == 0 && !term_->master) {
>                 info_box(term_, 0, N_("Error"), ALIGN_CENTER,
>                          N_("You can do this only on the master terminal"));
>                 return;
>         }
> 
> 
> (Of course it does not work by just remvoing the term_->master check.)
> 
> I think, or rather know from my own experience, that calling an external
> editor for formfields is a very essential feature, considering that the
> current formfield presentation is less than optimal for blind users
> using elinks with a braille device and text-to-speech. In fact, it is
> very painful. Would it be really that complicated to call an external
> editor for inserting data, maybe even using temporary files or sockets,
> into an elinks formfield? If so, is there a better elinks-internal
> formfield editor code available in an early stage, that would behave in
> a way similar to nano as a fullscreen editor?

Textareas are editable by external editors on slave terminals in 0.13.GIT.
I don't know why this feature was not applied to 0.12.
-- 
Witek