From: David Kastrup Date: Wed, 01 Aug 2007 19:30:57 GMT Subject: Re: Interpreting EDITOR/VISUAL environment variables. Message-ID: <85ir7zrr0u.fsf@lola.goethe.zz> In-Reply-To: <20070801185042.GB30277@nan92-1-81-57-214-146.fbx.proxad.net> Yann Dirson writes: > On Wed, Aug 01, 2007 at 10:12:13AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: >> We recently normalized the script callers not to splice at all >> (the scripts were hand-rolling "the VISUAL or EDITOR or vi" and >> slightly differently). It obviously has negative (i.e. setting >> EDITOR to "emacsclient --alternate-editor vi" does not work) as >> well as positive side (i.e. "/home/dak/My Programs/editor" would >> work). > > And, indeed, --alternate-editor could be supplemented by another > envvar to be able to work in our situation. It is already. But if git is pretty much alone in breaking a setup that is working everywhere else, is having a workaround available really a good excuse for not doing the right thing? > Maybe the various emacsen vendors would be willing to integrate such > a patch ? Actually, it is a nuisance because nobody remembers this variable. It is called (looking in the Emacs manual, using the index to find emacsclient, following a link after two pages to the invocation, going down two pages again) ALTERNATE_EDITOR. It does not even _mention_ Emacs or emacsclient in its name. The "-a" option is easier to remember. So yes, emacsclient has an environment hook making it possible to work around git's idiosyncratic behavior here. But should it really be necessary? -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum