[1599] in athena10
Re: EDITOR and VISUAL
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Fri Mar 13 09:08:38 2009
Cc: Tim Abbott <tabbott@mit.edu>, debathena@mit.edu
Message-Id: <1402CC74-E3E5-4059-8550-B05F1CCBC16F@mit.edu>
From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: Greg Price <price@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20090313054052.GW25963@mit.edu>
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Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 09:07:37 -0400
On Mar 13, 2009, at 1:40 AM, Greg Price wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 11:58:10PM -0400, Tim Abbott wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I agree. The "setting EDITOR doesn't work" issue has bit me, too.
>
> From zephyr:
>
> debathena / VISUAL / broder 00:22 (Evan Broder)
> Anyway, I'd definitely prefer setting just EDITOR
> debathena / VISUAL / geofft 00:23 (Purely applicative languages
> We could also make sensible-editor consider emacs more sensible than
> nano, and set neither.
> debathena / VISUAL / geofft 00:24 (If your computer speaks
> This does leave EDITOR unset for things not Debian-patched to know
> about sensible-editor, so probably not actually helpful. Never mind.
I think one upon a time, there was stuff (possibly vendor versions of
"more" or "less") that didn't honor EDITOR. If most everything checks
EDITOR eventually, let's go with that, and unset VISUAL. environ(7)
would seem to indicate that the variables are mostly equivalent these
days.
Aside: I assume sensible-editor defaults to nano in tty mode and gedit
for X11, or something like that. I'm not opposed to moving to those
sometime down the road, but as I've noted elsewhere, we have a lot of
documentation investment in Emacs, and currently lack the resources to
document nano or gedit.
-Jon
