Re: using gvim as editor on Windows

From: Tait <git.git@t41t.com>
Date: Mar 9, 2010, 02:45 UTC
Message-ID: <20100309024523.GU2480@ece.pdx.edu>
In-Reply-To: <201003090032.10037.markus.heidelberg@web.de>

> First of all: do you have the problems in cmd.exe or Git Bash or both?

cmd.exe

I've never used git bash until now, but the behavior is the same there.

Show 5 quoted lines

> > Does calling the .exe directly work for you? If I call gvim.exe directly
> > (with or without -f -- it doesn't matter), it opens a new file called
> > $@.
> 
> I don't know where the $@ should come from.

It comes from line 33 of editor.c, in launch_editor().
if (strcmp(editor, ":")) {
    /* ... */
    if (strcspn(editor, "$ \t'") != len) {
        /* there are specials */
        strbuf_addf(&arg0, "%s \"$@\"", editor);
        args[i++] = "sh";
        args[i++] = "-c";
        args[i++] = arg0.buf;
    }
    args[i++] = editor;
    args[i++] = path;
    args[i] = NULL;
    /* ... */
}

It looks like this was added to detect EDITOR=: but it also manages to catch Windows paths. I'm not familiar with the EDITOR=: convention. What is that supposed to indicate? Can we narrow the detection to that specific case, or does a : anywhere in EDITOR need to be handled this way?

Rebase doesn't use launch_editor, instead just calling the editor directly. Coming up with a combination of quoting and escaping that can pass both cases will be difficult or impossible.

It appears that e97c9a removed the code above from editor.c, but it's still present in prepare_shell_cmd() with even more legal filename characters like = and ;.

Thanks for the help Markus.

Tait