Re: call external editor from git-gui?

From: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Aug 14, 2007, 04:55 UTC
Message-ID: <20070814045511.GF27913@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <20070810153008.GA31759@diana.vm.bytemark.co.uk>

Karl Hasselstrm <kha@treskal.com> wrote:

> git-gui is very good at composing commits. But for writing the actual
> commit message -- especially if it's long and needs paragraph
> reflowing, indentation, and so on -- I vastly prefer emacs over
> git-gui's text field.

Yea, I've been thinking about adding fancy features like those.
But been lazy.  Spawning the user's preferred editor would be a
nice way to get some of that.

> It seems to me like it would be straightforward to have a button or
> something to launch the user's favorite editor for editing of the
> commit message -- after all, git even knows what editor that is!

Probably. git-gui already has the data from .git/config loaded in memory, it should be fairly simple.

> Unfortunately, with my tcl expertise, this is likely a whole-weekend
> project, so I probably won't try to build it myself in the near
> future.

With my busy schedule its unlikely to happen anytime soon either. But I've added it to my todo branch. Sometimes things on that list get accomplished. ;-)

An annoying work-around would be to run your editor to create/edit .git/GITGUI_MSG (or .git/MERGE_MSG) then hit Rescan in git-gui. It loads that file into its editor buffer if the editor buffer is empty or has not been modified from within git-gui since the last time the file was read.

-- 
Shawn.