Subject: [[email-masked]: NT: GUI programs started from shell-mode shell are invisible]

From: Richard Stallman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 5 Oct 1996 03:22:02 -0400

Can you do the right thing with this?

------- Start of forwarded message -------
From: Eric Hanchrow <[email-masked]>
To: "[email-masked]'" <[email-masked]>
Subject: NT: GUI programs started from shell-mode shell are invisible
Date: Fri, 4 Oct 1996 12:43:40 -0700
X-Mailer:  Microsoft Exchange Server Internet Mail Connector Version 4.0.994.29
Encoding: 15 TEXT

In GNU Emacs 19.33.1 (i386-*-nt4.0) of Wed Aug 14 1996 on ERICH4
configured using `configure NT'

Please describe exactly what actions triggered the bug
and the precise symptoms of the bug:

This is on NT 4 (build 1381).

actions:
	M-x s h e l l RET
	f r e e c e l l RET
symptoms:
The shell prompt appears after I hit RET, as I expect, but no
"freecell" window ever appears.  The "freecell" process exists,
according to Task Manager.
------- End of forwarded message -------

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From: Andrew Innes <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 15:00:28 +0100

>Can you do the right thing with this?

I don't think we can in this case.  We need to force the console window
that the command shell inherits to be hidden to avoid clutter on the
screen.  It appears that this has the side effect of hiding GUI apps
that are run directly from the shell, unless the user remembers to type
"start freecell" instead of just "freecell" to run the GUI program
asynchronously.

Since subprocess support is intended primarily for command-line
programs, hopefully this isn't a major problem although it is certainly
unfortunate.  It doesn't happen on Windows 95 though.

Doing a little more experimentation, it appears to be specific to the
standard NT command shell as well.  If I use a cut-down shell program I
wrote for testing, the problem doesn't happen.

----

This is probably a good time to mention that I am intending to submit a
change (hopefully for the next release, if it's not too soon) to the
subprocess support code that will allow Emacs to run multiple DOS
programs on Windows and to interrupt them - the inability to do these
two things is a major limitation of Emacs subprocesses on Windows 95
right now.

BTW, is there a way I can update my 19.34 source tree to match the FSF
source?  I'm thinking of when Geoff submits patches to change "win32"
prefixes to "w32", which will probably be before I submit my changes -
it would mean my patches could be applied directly.

AndrewI