[Spread-users] ANNOUNCE: spread.el, a Spread Toolkit client for Emacs

[Thomas Munro]

Hi

Announcing an implementation of the Spread Toolkit client protocol for
Emacs Lisp:

http://github.com/macdice/protocolarium/blob/master/spread.el

To use it, you also need bio.el, a small library for reading from buffers:

http://github.com/macdice/protocolarium/blob/master/bio.el

There is a little example program called omnibuf.el that uses
spread.el to implement a shared network kill so that you can copy from
one Emacs process and paste in other (possibly on a different
computer) using the magic of Spread.  Omnibuf also has a simple shared
buffer facility, so that you can multicast the contents of a buffer to
other Emacs sessions on your network as you edit it (other people get
a read-only view of the buffer as it changes, for now, maybe someone
can figure out how to make shared read/write buffers...).

http://github.com/macdice/protocolarium/blob/master/omnibuf.el

The main purpose for having Spread support in Emacs, for me, is for
development of distributed applications -- for example, I have a
cluster of Common Lisp and Java processes doing computations, and it
is useful to be able to test, control and monitor them via Spread
messages from inside Emacs Lisp.

It probably has lots of bugs, and there are some bits of the protocol
that I haven't quite figured out yet, and it supports only with
3.17.x, but maybe someone else will find it useful for something.

Thanks
Thomas Munro