Emacs-Tramp-Terminator-Integration

iTerm2 has a feature called Triggers which doesn’t seem to exist in any of the Linux terminal emulators.

Terminator has a plugin system, so I hacked together something that would parse emacs-formatted ‘urls’ and open those urls in Emacs over Tramp. The concept of tying triggers with the terminal emulator is borrowed from my ECE MEng advisor, Prof. (Christopher Batten)[http://www.csl.cornell.edu/~cbatten/].

Concept

The idea is as follows. ssh into the research server to access source code there. Instead of customizing Emacs on every server you work with, customize only one - the one on the computer that you ssh from.

Generate a string containing information about the current user and server IP address, and the path to the file you want to edit.

I do this using a bash function added to .bashrc on the remote server:

# Remote emacsclient trigger
function oe() {
    user=$(whoami)
    file=$(echo "$1" | tr -d ' ')
    hostname=$(hostname -I | tr -d ' ')
    workingdir=$(pwd | tr -d ' ')
    echo "remote-emacsclient-trigger[[[/$user@${hostname}:${workingdir}/${file}]]]"
}

So say I’m in /home/user/ on the remote server and I’m working on blah.

oe blah

will cause the remote server to echo

remote-emacsclient-trigger[[[/user@123.123.123.123:/home/user/blah]]]

In iTerm2, the trigger can pick up the string and in turn start a coprocess with the line emacsclient -c -n <the content between [[[ and ]]]>, using regex matches.

The following plugin, written for Terminator, will give you a similar effect, except you have to right click on the part between [[[ and ]]], and click open link.

Download

Place that file in /usr/share/terminator/terminatorlib/plugins/activate_emacs.py and restart Terminator, then right click and click Preferences, go to the Plugins tab and check the ActivateEmacs plugin.

The process

There’s little documentation on plugin writing, so it took a while to look through the examples and other plugins to start. Fortunately Terminator’s code could mostly be found in /usr/share/terminator/, but unfortunately it still takes time to scan through all the code.

There are lots of functions in terminator’s code to do with matching, but I believe those are only activated on mouseovers rather than as they appear in the terminal.

The URLHandler plugin sounds like it could parse any text or string - it can, but only on mouseovers. The callback() function is something that is meant to transform the ‘url’ that matched to another url for a web browser to open; it does not perform actions on the matched string directly.

Jocelyn’s comment was so super useful in writing this plugin!