From: Mike Ralphson Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2007 07:59:41 GMT Subject: Re: call external editor from git-gui? Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <86ir7g4p92.fsf@lola.quinscape.zz> It seems quite common to have a trio of environment variables: $EDITOR, $VISUAL and $XEDITOR, for line, tty-aware and graphical editors respectively. [http://xdvi.sourceforge.net/inverse-search-emacs-noauctex.html] [http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2006-December/010783.html] Whether git needs to have a trio of overrides for them is a different matter, or could just recommend that git be aliased or wrapped if the editors needed for git are different to normal. Cheers, Mike On 8/15/07, David Kastrup wrote: > 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).