Opening files from MS Windows

[Agnar Renolen]

This is not really a bug, rather an annoyance.

When I drag a file over the RunEmacs icon in Windows, or chooses RunEmacs in
the "Send to" context menu, Emacs opens the file with the 8.3 filename.
This annoys me a little.  I even recall for windows NT that a new file was
created when I saved the file, rather than rewriting the existing file
(which IS a bug).  I'm not having that problem now running Emacs 20.5.1
under Windows 2000, probably because I'm running the FAT file system rather
than the NTFS file system.  I don't know whether this is corrected in later
versions of Emacs.

The source of the problem is not in Emacs itself, but (of course) in
Windows.  Whenever you drag a file over a program icon, or chooses tha
program in the "Send To" context menu, Windows supplies the 8.3 filename in
the argument vector.  I have experienced this myself in my own projects.

The following script will solve this problem in Tcl.  I believe it should be
possible to implement a similar startup procedure for Emacs too.


if {$argc != "0"} {
    foreach fname $argv {
        if {[file exists $fname]} {
            if {$tcl_platform(platform) == "windows"} {
                set fname [file attributes $fname -longname]
            }
            OpenFile $fname
        } else {
              CreateFile $fname
        }
    }
}


Yours sincerely
Agnar Renolen
Trondheim, Norway