Having recently purchased Windows 7 Ultimate in order to gain access to the SUA - http://www.suacommunity.com - subsystem, I have been struggling to get SUA's bash utility (/usr/local/bin/bash) working with EmacsW32. SUA comes with ksh and csh by default, so I installed a community bundle to obtain the bash process.
M-x shell normally invokes a shell process and pipes stdio through an Emacs buffer. This works well with Cygwin. I have tried adjusting emacs variables like w32-shell-* to point it at the SUA bash executable, and also tried invoking bash via the posix.exe tool provided with SUA. I often see that the file descriptors associated with the bash process are deleted as soon as the process is created by EmacsW32.
Cygwin is very slow compared to SUA, so I am very keen to get this facility working with the EmacsW32 + SUA combo. Any tips, experience, solutions would be appreciated.
I don't know the w32-shell-* variables. Maybe you could show some code to illustrate what you mean.
I also don't know SUA.
I use GNU emacs v22 on Windows, and I run powershell as an inferior shell. I had some difficulties initially, similar to yours, and solved them with a better understanding of how to start the shell. Maybe this will help you.
I use these variables:
(setq explicit-shell-file-name
"c:\\windows\\system32\\WindowsPowerShell\\v1.0\\powershell.exe")
(setq explicit-powershell.exe-args
'("-Command" "-" )) ;; interactive, but no command prompt
I had difficulty until I realized two things:
if you don't specify command-line arguments for the shell process, emacs silently defaults to using -i. In the case of powershell, that argument was either not supported or it did something other than what I wanted (I forget). So I had to explicitly set the arguments to invoke the shell.
the name of the variable for specifying arguments to the shell, depends on the name of the program used to start the shell. This isn't documented as far as I know (unless you consider the source code to be documentation!). If you're on Linux and running sh, then the variable is explicit-sh-args. If bsh, then explicit-bsh-args. If you're on Windows, you need to use the proper name of the exe, including the .exe suffix. It makes for a strange looking variable name, but it works.
The full code to start powershell as an inferior emacs shell is like this:
;; get a name for the buffer
(setq buffer (get-buffer-create "*PowerShell*"))
(let ((tmp-shellfile explicit-shell-file-name))
(setq explicit-shell-file-name
"c:\\windows\\system32\\WindowsPowerShell\\v1.0\\powershell.exe")
(setq explicit-powershell.exe-args
'("-Command" "-" )) ; interactive, but no command prompt
;; launch the shell
(shell buffer)
; restore the original shell
(if tmp-shellfile
(setq explicit-shell-file-name tmp-shellfile)))
Maybe something like that would work for you.
Related
I'm running GNU Emacs (23.1.1) on Windows and when I run a cygwin shell inside emacs I get garbage like the following, after each command:
^[]0;/cygdrive/c/emacs-23.1/bin
^[[32user#HOST [33m/cygdrive/c/emacs-23.1/bin[0m
Note: I've replaced my real user and host name with user/HOST.
I've found a few links that describe how to set up emacs with cygwin on Windows including this one on SO:
How can I run Cygwin Bash Shell from within Emacs?
That hasn't helped. As of right now, I don't have anything referencing shells in my .emacs file except for this:
;; For the interactive shell
(setq explicit-shell-file-name "bash")
So I'm not even sure how emacs is finding my cygwin shell. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.
Try adding these lines to your .emacs file
(autoload 'ansi-color-for-comint-mode-on "ansi-color" nil t)
(add-hook 'shell-mode-hook 'ansi-color-for-comint-mode-on)
I'm not sure if these are the correct ones but let me know (as my .emacs file has gotten quite large over the years)
I'm trying to get a compile command (rake cucumber) to run with a specific ruby version on my Mac OS X system, I use rvm to do this currently in the terminal. My ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist has the correct path in it, but emacs insists on prepending to this path and therefore making it useless. I've also tried:
(when (equal system-type 'darwin)
(setenv "PATH" (concat "/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/bin:/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.8.7-p249/bin:/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p249/bin:/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p249%global/bin:/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/bin"))
(push "/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/bin" exec-path)
(push "/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.8.7-p249/bin" exec-path)
(push "/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p249/bin" exec-path)
(push "/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p249%global/bin" exec-path)
(push "/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/bin" exec-path))
It was the desperate attempt of an emacs beginner to get what I wanted. It still prepends in front of it, so my path ends up being:
/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin:/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/bin:/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.8.7-p249/bin:/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p249/bin:/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p249%global/bin
I don't want /usr/bin and others prepending, I want my path first and the emacs prepended path to be at the end, I reckon this would fix my problem.
I test this by simply opening Aquamacs and running meta-x compile and then echo $PATH.
Any ideas?
A small modification to the solution by sanityinc (couldn't find a way to enter it in the comments above -- is that just me?)
I use -l option to the shell to force a login shell (which reads .profile or .bash_profile), rather than an interactive shell (which only reads .bashrc).
I do some string trimming on the returned path (as inspection shows a newline sneaking in).
Modified code:
(defun set-exec-path-from-shell-PATH ()
(let ((path-from-shell
(replace-regexp-in-string "[[:space:]\n]*$" ""
(shell-command-to-string "$SHELL -l -c 'echo $PATH'"))))
(setenv "PATH" path-from-shell)
(setq exec-path (split-string path-from-shell path-separator))))
(when (equal system-type 'darwin) (set-exec-path-from-shell-PATH))
Everyone seems to have misunderstood the original issue: the path is already setup correctly in Emacs, and the correct path is already passed to the shell started by the compile command! So what gives? Here is the answer:
In MacOS X, there is a small tool called path_helper(1). It is called by default from /etc/profile, which is executed by Bash on shell startup. When you start a compilation from Emacs, it launches a shell (which by default is Bash on MacOS X), and therefore executes this path_helper tool. And here comes the key point: path_helper rearranges your path, moving the standard directories like /usr/bin in front of your custom added directories, no matter where you originally added them. Try this yourself by opening a shell and first having a look at what PATH is, and then execute /usr/lib/path_helper and have look at the resulting PATH!
The brute force solution for you might be to simply comment out the call to path_helper in /etc/profile. Note however that then you won't automatically get the paths in /etc/paths.d setup by path_helper, which is the tool's main purpose.
I don't have a Mac, so I cannot test this directly, but this can all be found in the *info* page Interactive Inferior Shell.
When you start a shell in Emacs, the process that gets spawned is the program in the Emacs variable explicit-shell-file-name (and if that is nil, the environment variables ESHELL and SHELL are used).
It then sends the contents of ~/.emacs_*shellname* (e.g. if your shell is csh, then ~/.emacs_csh would be sent over. Also, the appropriate .rc files for csh program is sourced, so you can update that as well (in my case .cshrc). Additionally, you can wrap customizations in the .rc file with a check for the environment variable INSIDE_EMACS (which which Emacs sets before it runs a shell).
You need to update those files to change the path in the shell, not the Emacs variable exec-path. exec-path - which is just a list of directories Emacs uses to find executable programs. The behavior of the executables are not affected by changes to exec-path.
I find the environment.plist scheme on Macs pretty ugly, so I use the following snippet, which assumes you want Emacs to use the same PATH that you see in your Terminal.app:
(defun set-exec-path-from-shell-PATH ()
(let ((path-from-shell (shell-command-to-string "$SHELL -i -c 'echo $PATH'")))
(setenv "PATH" path-from-shell)
(setq exec-path (split-string path-from-shell path-separator))))
(This works for me in Emacs 23; haven't tried it in other versions, but I'd expect it to work.)
try this maybe. replace path string with yours.
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/opt/swank-clojure/src/emacs")
As far as I observed, Emacs takes the path variable from the shell it is launched from, so one solution is to change $PATH in the shell before you launch Emacs.
One other approach I used, which is more flexible, is to use a Makefile and append a "source ~/script_that_set_path" in front of each make commands you have.
I have tried so many different approaches to this that ended up not using emacs to setup my compilation command environment.
What I do now is to create a run_helper.sh file that simply initializes a clean environment and then uses exec $* to execute the command passed as argument to run_helper.sh
This run_helper.sh is usually project specific, but I keep a template which I use to start with when I create a new project.
Then I simple run compile from emacs like bash run_helper.sh rspec path/to/tests for example.
If I am using this to run ruby tests, my helper initializes RVM to use the proper ruby and gemset. If I am using some other language it may just export required environment variables or perform some other initialization, but this way I can do it in bash script instead of always having to mess with emacs paths and elisp every time I start a new project.
Here's an example of a run_helper.sh file
#!/bin/bash
cd /Users/simao/Documents/sp
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/local/mysql/lib:$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH"
source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" # This loads the proper ruby and gemset from .rvmrc
export RAILS_ENV=test
exec $*
This also makes my tests run faster because I have lots of stuff in my .zshrc that I don't want to load just to run some tests.
It worked for me with two things.
First I followed sanityinc advice
An improved and modified version of the code snippet is now published as elisp library called exec-path-from-shell; installable packages are available in Marmalade and Melpa
I still had a problem with compile commands. Valko Sipuli is right there was a problem involving path_helper.
I commented the corresponding line in /etc/profile and it did not help. Problem still there.
I don't use bash but zsh. Digging a little I found /etc/zshenv. This file also calls path_helper.
After commenting the path_helper section in /etc/zshenv my path is finally correct
M-x grep, M-x lgrep, M-x rgrep don't work in EmacsW32 for me.
I do M-x lgrep and it says grep is not a command:
grep -i -n "hello" * NUL
'grep' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
Grep finished with no matches found at Sun Jan 31 05:59:06
Also what is that NUL thing? EmacsW32 homepage says it ships with Gnuwin32 utilities but it seems the work to configuring to actually use the Gnuwin32 grep is left to users.
How can I configure it to use either the shipped Gnuwin32 grep or the cygwin grep? Are both fine?
This article has some tips on how to get this working.
I got this working the other day, you can set the PATH environment variable inside emacs, and if you have cygwin and/or gnuw32 installed just set the path to those. This is a snippet from my .emacs that's applicable on windows only. I set to variables (cygwin-bin, gnu-bin) to the path where the programs are installed. Then build the path to those. One drawback is it blows away the rest of my path. Which hasn't been an issue so far, but If I was smarter with LISP I could probably figure something out. Anyway, hope this helps.
;;windows only stuff
(when (string-equal system-type "windows-nt")
(progn
(setq cygwin-bin "c:\\apps\\cygwin\\bin")
(setq gnu-bin "C:\\apps\\GnuWin32\\gnuwin32\\bin")
(setenv "PATH"
(concat cygwin-bin ";" gnu-bin ";"))
(setq exec-path
'(cygwin-bin gnu-bin))))
I should add, I arrived at this solution because putting qnuwin32 in front of the path in windows seems to be a risky proposition, you run the risk of messing up other programs on your machine. So this seemed to be a good compromise.
Windows doesn't come with a grep utility (in fact it does have findstr, but it's not exactly the same), so you need to install something like cygwin or unix utils for windows. After installing those, you need to add them to %PATH%, so that windows would know where to look for them. You can do that either in command line by running cmd.exe and issuing a command set PATH=<your_path>;%PATH% or in some settings widow you get by right clicking a My Computer icon (called something like environment variables here are some pictures of it).
Note, windows has a utility called find and it is also in system %PATH%, that can make certain commands (like M-x grep-find) not work correctly, so it is important you put unix-find first in your %PATH%.
I think the EmacsW32 user first need to set the user option w32shell-shell via the menu Options > Customize EmacsW32, which is set to none originally, and the user should set it to either cmd or cygwin. Setting it to cmd means M-x grep will use the built-in Gnuwin32 grep (and cmd.exe as a shell) and if the setting is saved correctly, the dotemacs will contain lines like the following:
(custom-set-variables
...
'(w32shell-shell (quote cmd))
...)
The custom-set-variable form should be placed as close to the beginning of the dotemacs as possible.
For some reason in my system, this is not enough, M-x grep will insist to use "grep -n" as its template rather than "grep -nH -e" and it always appends "NUL". In that case, add the following line in the dotemacs file.
(grep-compute-defaults)
Here's a no-nonsense answer that works:
http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.emacs.help/browse_thread/thread/39cd9d63b07a9988#
Enjoy!
I use Cygwin (an old version). For Emacs I use libraries cygwin-mount.el and setup-cygwin.el, loaded in that order. Works just fine.
I am running GNU Emacs on Windows so entering:
M-x shell
launches the Windows command-line DOS shell. However, I would like to instead be able to run the Cygwin Bash Shell (or any other non-Windows shell) from within Emacs. How can this be easily done?
shell-file-name is the variable that controls which shell Emacs uses when it wants to run a shell command.
explicit-shell-file-name is the variable that controls which shell M-x shell starts up.
Ken's answer changes both of those, which you may or may not want.
You can also have a function that starts a different shell by temporarily changing explicit-shell-file-name:
(defun cygwin-shell ()
"Run cygwin bash in shell mode."
(interactive)
(let ((explicit-shell-file-name "C:/cygwin/bin/bash"))
(call-interactively 'shell)))
You will probably also want to pass the --login argument to bash, because you're starting a new Cygwin session. You can do that by setting explicit-bash-args. (Note that M-x shell uses explicit-PROGRAM-args, where PROGRAM is the filename part of the shell's pathname. This is why you should not include the .exe when setting the shell.
The best solution I've found to this is the following:
;; When running in Windows, we want to use an alternate shell so we
;; can be more unixy.
(setq shell-file-name "C:/MinGW/msys/1.0/bin/bash")
(setq explicit-shell-file-name shell-file-name)
(setenv "PATH"
(concat ".:/usr/local/bin:/mingw/bin:/bin:"
(replace-regexp-in-string " " "\\\\ "
(replace-regexp-in-string "\\\\" "/"
(replace-regexp-in-string "\\([A-Za-z]\\):" "/\\1"
(getenv "PATH"))))))
The problem with passing "--login" as cjm suggests is your shell will always start in your home directory. But if you're editing a file and you hit "M-x shell", you want your shell in that file's directory. Furthermore, I've tested this setup with "M-x grep" and "M-x compile". I'm suspicious that other examples here wouldn't work with those due to directory and PATH problems.
This elisp snippet belongs in your ~/.emacs file. If you want to use Cygwin instead of MinGW, change the first string to C:/cygwin/bin/bash. The second string is prepended to your Windows PATH (after converting that PATH to an appropriately unixy form); in Cygwin you probably want "~/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:" or something similar.
I use XEmacs with Cygwin, and can run bash from XEmacs relatively easily.
Here's the relevant section from init.el
;; Let's use CYGWIN bash...
;;
(setq binary-process-input t)
(setq w32-quote-process-args ?\")
(setq shell-file-name "bash") ;; or sh if you rename your bash executable to sh.
(setenv "SHELL" shell-file-name)
(setq explicit-shell-file-name shell-file-name)
(setq explicit-sh-args '("-login" "-i"))
One more important hint on this subject.
If you use Emacs shell mode and want both bash and cmd sometimes, set it up to use bash by default, because you can type cmd at bash and the resulting dos shell works just fine.
If you setup Emacs to use cmd as the shell (which is the way NT emacs installs), then dos shell works fine, but if you type bash or bash -i to run a bash shell, the resulting shell doesn't work right - see answer 0.
But it works fine if bash is the "first" shell emacs invokes.
You can run bash directly from the default Windows command-line shell within your Emacs *shell* buffer:
Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.
C:\temp>bash
bash
However, no command prompt is visible which can be disorienting resulting in your commands and their output results all blending together.
In addition, for some unknown reason, if you do enter a command and hit return, a return line character (\r) is appended to the end of your command statement causing a bash error:
ls
bash: line 1: $'ls\r': command not found
A workaround is to manually add a comment character (#) at the end of every command which effectively comments out the \r text:
ls #
myfile,txt
foo.bar
anotherfile.txt
This overall approach is far from ideal but might be useful if you want to drop into bash from Windows' native shell to do some quick operations and then exit out to continue working in Windows.
I'm using EmacsW32. C-h a shell$ gives a list of shell launching commands and the commands cmd-shell and cygwin-shell look interesting. Both commands need EmacsW32. They are also found in the menu: Tools > W&32 Shells.
If you run cygwin-shell for the first time, and if you have not setup cygwin path in Emacs, it leads you to the Customization page where you can setup the cygwin path by pressing Find button.
Since these approaches didn't work for me I got it the following way:
(I'm using NTEmacs which opens a dos shell by default, so perhaps your emacs behaves the same)
Create a windows environment variable named SHELL ('SHELL' not '$SHELL') and give it the path to bash.exe of your cygwin installation (for example c:\programs\cygwin\bin\bash.exe)
Now when doing M-x shell it opens a bash.
Regards,
Inno
In addition to #Chris Jones' answer about avoiding the --login argument to bash, I set the following command line arguments:
(setq explicit-bash-args '("--noediting" "-i"))
The --noediting option prevents interference with the GNU readline library and the -i option specifies that the shell is interactive. I also use the .emacs_bash file in my home directory for any emacs specific bash customizations.
I am running GNU Emacs on Windows so entering:
M-x shell
launches the Windows command-line DOS shell. However, I would like to instead be able to run the Cygwin Bash Shell (or any other non-Windows shell) from within Emacs. How can this be easily done?
shell-file-name is the variable that controls which shell Emacs uses when it wants to run a shell command.
explicit-shell-file-name is the variable that controls which shell M-x shell starts up.
Ken's answer changes both of those, which you may or may not want.
You can also have a function that starts a different shell by temporarily changing explicit-shell-file-name:
(defun cygwin-shell ()
"Run cygwin bash in shell mode."
(interactive)
(let ((explicit-shell-file-name "C:/cygwin/bin/bash"))
(call-interactively 'shell)))
You will probably also want to pass the --login argument to bash, because you're starting a new Cygwin session. You can do that by setting explicit-bash-args. (Note that M-x shell uses explicit-PROGRAM-args, where PROGRAM is the filename part of the shell's pathname. This is why you should not include the .exe when setting the shell.
The best solution I've found to this is the following:
;; When running in Windows, we want to use an alternate shell so we
;; can be more unixy.
(setq shell-file-name "C:/MinGW/msys/1.0/bin/bash")
(setq explicit-shell-file-name shell-file-name)
(setenv "PATH"
(concat ".:/usr/local/bin:/mingw/bin:/bin:"
(replace-regexp-in-string " " "\\\\ "
(replace-regexp-in-string "\\\\" "/"
(replace-regexp-in-string "\\([A-Za-z]\\):" "/\\1"
(getenv "PATH"))))))
The problem with passing "--login" as cjm suggests is your shell will always start in your home directory. But if you're editing a file and you hit "M-x shell", you want your shell in that file's directory. Furthermore, I've tested this setup with "M-x grep" and "M-x compile". I'm suspicious that other examples here wouldn't work with those due to directory and PATH problems.
This elisp snippet belongs in your ~/.emacs file. If you want to use Cygwin instead of MinGW, change the first string to C:/cygwin/bin/bash. The second string is prepended to your Windows PATH (after converting that PATH to an appropriately unixy form); in Cygwin you probably want "~/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:" or something similar.
I use XEmacs with Cygwin, and can run bash from XEmacs relatively easily.
Here's the relevant section from init.el
;; Let's use CYGWIN bash...
;;
(setq binary-process-input t)
(setq w32-quote-process-args ?\")
(setq shell-file-name "bash") ;; or sh if you rename your bash executable to sh.
(setenv "SHELL" shell-file-name)
(setq explicit-shell-file-name shell-file-name)
(setq explicit-sh-args '("-login" "-i"))
One more important hint on this subject.
If you use Emacs shell mode and want both bash and cmd sometimes, set it up to use bash by default, because you can type cmd at bash and the resulting dos shell works just fine.
If you setup Emacs to use cmd as the shell (which is the way NT emacs installs), then dos shell works fine, but if you type bash or bash -i to run a bash shell, the resulting shell doesn't work right - see answer 0.
But it works fine if bash is the "first" shell emacs invokes.
You can run bash directly from the default Windows command-line shell within your Emacs *shell* buffer:
Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.
C:\temp>bash
bash
However, no command prompt is visible which can be disorienting resulting in your commands and their output results all blending together.
In addition, for some unknown reason, if you do enter a command and hit return, a return line character (\r) is appended to the end of your command statement causing a bash error:
ls
bash: line 1: $'ls\r': command not found
A workaround is to manually add a comment character (#) at the end of every command which effectively comments out the \r text:
ls #
myfile,txt
foo.bar
anotherfile.txt
This overall approach is far from ideal but might be useful if you want to drop into bash from Windows' native shell to do some quick operations and then exit out to continue working in Windows.
I'm using EmacsW32. C-h a shell$ gives a list of shell launching commands and the commands cmd-shell and cygwin-shell look interesting. Both commands need EmacsW32. They are also found in the menu: Tools > W&32 Shells.
If you run cygwin-shell for the first time, and if you have not setup cygwin path in Emacs, it leads you to the Customization page where you can setup the cygwin path by pressing Find button.
Since these approaches didn't work for me I got it the following way:
(I'm using NTEmacs which opens a dos shell by default, so perhaps your emacs behaves the same)
Create a windows environment variable named SHELL ('SHELL' not '$SHELL') and give it the path to bash.exe of your cygwin installation (for example c:\programs\cygwin\bin\bash.exe)
Now when doing M-x shell it opens a bash.
Regards,
Inno
In addition to #Chris Jones' answer about avoiding the --login argument to bash, I set the following command line arguments:
(setq explicit-bash-args '("--noediting" "-i"))
The --noediting option prevents interference with the GNU readline library and the -i option specifies that the shell is interactive. I also use the .emacs_bash file in my home directory for any emacs specific bash customizations.