Re: [PATCH] contrib/git-jump: cat output when not a terminal

From: George Brown <321.george@gmail.com>
Date: May 10, 2020, 09:03 UTC
Message-ID: <CAFKec1UGKbaV7wC78i8+uSEizjGkj2bDSfOeucvJORhORvc5KA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq8si0vfp3.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>

> I am not sure what you mean by "receiving lines".  Your patch makes
> the "git jump" command completely ignore configured GIT_EDITOR and
> refuse to invoke *any* editor.

Running "git jump" from a shell prompt works as before with this patch.

But now within Vim it can also be used to populate the quickfix list with something like ":cexpr system('git jump')". Because instead of invoking another instance of (which does not work well for Vim) it just receives the lines as formatted by "git jump".

> > Would it work to set GIT_EDITOR to "cat" while performing the
> > "populating quickfix list" (whatever that is) operation?
>
> It would, though I considered this to be less elegant.

Just to revise this, it wouldn't actually as the editor is always passed "-q" (intended for Vim's quickfix list). So overriding this to "cat" causes as error as "-q" is not a valid option for it.

I'm aware the examples I'm giving are specific to Vim but it really seems that "git jump" was intended with Vim in mind. That said I'd argue most other editors would work better with "git jump" if when they invoked it another instance wasn't created. I've tried find an equivalent to Vim's quickfix in Emacs this morning but can't quite wrap my head around it.