Re: call external editor from git-gui?

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Aug 15, 2007, 18:38 UTC
Message-ID: <86ir7g4p92.fsf@lola.quinscape.zz>
In-Reply-To: <20070815182228.GA3419@efreet.light.src>

Jan Hudec <bulb@ucw.cz> writes:

Show 15 quoted lines

> On Tue, Aug 14, 2007 at 09:00:00 +0200, Karl Hasselström wrote:
>> On 2007-08-14 00:55:11 -0400, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:
>> > Spawning the user's preferred editor would be a nice way to get some
>> > of that.
>> 
>> Mmm. I wouldn't call it a _nice_ way: popping up an external program
>> just to get the right text editing behavior. More like the _only_ way,
>> if the user is picky enough.
>
> It might actually have a rather serious twist. Often the editor for
> git-commit would use the terminal git-commit runs on. But for git-gui you may
> not have any terminal (running git-gui from context menu of some file
> manager) and even if you do, the user does not expect it to be used. So the
> user may -- and quite often will -- want different editors for running from
> git-gui and git-commit.

The usual convention (though _very_ hard to find anywhere explicitly, so it might more often than not be ignored) is that $VISUAL points to an editor that requires a tty to work on, while $EDITOR might get along without one.

So one uses VISUAL in preference of EDITOR on ttys/proper terminals, but only EDITOR when without one. A call from git-gui would probably fall in the second category. A call from tig, in contrast, in the first category.

The GIT_EDITOR variable has no way of expressing this difference, though. And I doubt that many people remember this. I googled around but failed to come up with a useful reference (of course, both variable names being common words does not exactly help).

-- 
David Kastrup