Subject: Re: drag and drop support for emacs (code)

From: Andrew Innes <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 1996 15:42:34 GMT

[Sorry for the delay in responding]

On Tue, 22 Oct 1996 20:37:32 +0200 (GMT), [email-masked] (Dan Nicolaescu) said:
>Hi!
>
>I have wrote some code to add drag-and-drop suppport for emacs. With this
>you can drop files from explorer on an emacs frame and they are loaded.
>There still are some problems, like the files don't show until some
>key is pressed.
>It's the first time I mess with emacs in C, so please don't kill me for it. :-)
>I have tested it only on windows95, no idea if it works on NT. I'll try
>tommorow.
>I am not sure the approach I take was the right one, but at least from this
>code you can get the names of the files beeing dropped, so doing it in a
>different way shouldn't be so hard.

Dipankar Gupta <[email-masked]> wrote code over the summer to add
drag and drop support to NT Emacs - Richard Stallman has said he intends
to include this at some stage (possibly 19.35 but he hasn't said).

Chances are that we will use Dipankar's code, partly because it is more
general and could be adapted with minimal changes (I think) to support
D&D on other platforms as well (eg. the Common Desktop Environment on
Unix).  The main difference from your code is that drop messages are
turned into proper lisp events, like keystrokes and mouse events, which
are handled using the normal lisp event system.  (This is the Emacs way
of doing things.)

>An observation I've made: if I added the code you see in w32fns.c
>in 'win32_wnd_proc',
>
>case WM_INITMENU:
>      {
>	reset_modifiers ();
>	goto dflt;
>      }
>emacs doesn't crash when selecting something from a menu when using
>flashparen.el and a paren is blinking. But still are some problems with this.

Yeah, there have been a number of reports of problems relating to
modifiers and other keyboard problems, so hopefully this will get looked
into for the next release.

Thank you for working on this anyway - please don't be discouraged that
we probably won't use your code in this particular instance.

Unfortunately, we (meaning the NT Emacs developers) haven't been able to
find time yet to set up a mailing list or forum for interested people to
work on bug fixes or contribute extensions like this without risk of
duplicating each other's work.  There is so much that needs doing, it
would be helpful to have more people to work on it, but it needs
coordination which takes extra time (principally from Geoff, who is the
official maintainer of the Win32 Emacs port).  As a result,
contributions have tended to happen on a rather ad-hoc basis.

AndrewI