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

George Brown <321.george@gmail.com> writes:

I am worried not only about the editors that are launched by git-jump that runs GIT_EDITOR, or the use case where you run git-jump from within your editor. "git jump" that is launched from a process, whose standard output steam is not connected to a terminal, used to spawn the specified editor just fine. Imagine a user wanted to spawn a graphical editor via git-jump from within a GUI script (probably launched from a window manager menu and has no terminal). With git-jump with this patch, such a use will be broken, no? The GIT_EDITOR the user set is totally ignored.

At the very least, we should have an escape hatch to help those this patch is hurting, perhaps like

        open_editor() {
                if ! test -t 1 && test -z "$GIT_JUMP_IGNORE_STDOUT_CHECK"
                then
                        cat "$1"
                else
                        editor=`git var GIT_EDITOR`
                        eval "$editor -q \$1"
                fi
        }

so that at least they can spawn their chosen editor, not "cat", from the tool they have been using.

Because this is a new feature, instead of breaking existing users and forcing them to do something different they did not have to (namely, set and export the GIT_JUMP_IGNORE_STDOUT_CHECK environment variable), we should instead make this a non-default behaviour and those who want it should explicitly opt-in to trigger it, perhaps like:

        open_editor() {
                if ! test -t 1 && test -n "$GIT_JUMP_AUTO_CAT"
                then
                        cat "$1"
                else
                        editor=`git var GIT_EDITOR`
                        eval "$editor -q \$1"
                fi
        }

so that existing users won't get affected by this change at all, while allowing you and other vim users to set and export the environment variable just once.

Unilaterally breaking, and ignoring when you are told you are breaking, possible existing users, without giving them any escape hatch, is simply irresponsible, and not something done in this project. But I am sensing that you are not listening to and thinking about what you hear before you respond, so I will stop spending time on this topic for now, and wait until others chime in.