Re: opening new diffs in existing window

["Daniel E. Macks" <dmacks netspace org>]

Kacper Wysocki <kacperw online no> said:
> Hello all,
> I really like meld for visual diffing, but I often have several files
> diffed at the same time, so it would be very helpful to have new diffs
> open in an existing meld window - something that for example gedit
> currently does. To be precise, I would like meld to check, on startup,
> if there's another instance open already and if it is, open the
> requested diff in a new tab in the existing window. What's great is
> that meld already has tabs - all we need to do is check for an
> existing instance on startup, and pass it the arguments.
>
> I've tried looking at the meld source and what gedit does, but the
> truth is I do not have much experience with gtk. My question is:
> What would be the best way to have meld detect and communicate with an
> existing instance? Shared memory, unix domain sockets, message queues,
> a pid file or dbus? Or does GTK itself have a facility for doing this?
> Where would such a change fit the best?

The most modern gnomish library for handling IPC is probably dbus, and
appears to be what evince uses for this type of "successive concurrent
executions open within the original parent process" functionality. See

  http://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-tutorial.html

for quick info about dbus and a few python examples.

dan

-- 
Daniel Macks
dmacks netspace org
http://www.netspace.org/~dmacks