[1587] in athena10
EDITOR and VISUAL
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tim Abbott)
Thu Mar 12 23:59:09 2009
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 23:58:10 -0400 (EDT)
From: Tim Abbott <tabbott@MIT.EDU>
To: debathena@mit.edu
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.10.0903111453260.27030@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
One thing that came up recently is that the system dotfiles currently set
both EDITOR and VISUAL to emacs. Apparently, this can be annoying because
in order to change the default editor for just a single command one might
try
$ EDITOR=gedit svn ci
(or whatever) and find that it still opens emacs because perhaps svn tries
VISUAL (if it is set) before inspecting EDITOR.
It is my impression that the appropriate thing to do here is to just set
EDITOR to emacs and leave the default VISUAL unset, because the standard
application behavior is to either just try EDITOR or try VISUAL and
fallback to EDITOR if EDITOR is unset.
Thoughts?
-Tim Abbott
