On 2008.04.03 15:20:22 -0500, Spencer Janssen
I think this $EDITOR business is a bit silly, for several reasons. $EDITOR by default is set to a terminal based program, like vi or nano. This means that the raiseEditor function, for many users (essentially everyone that doesn't use emacs), is totally useless. What is the advantage of raiseEditor over runOrRaise "emacs"?
Also, I'm morally opposed to the default of "emacs" in getEditor, but we can leave religion out of this.
Cheers, Spencer Janssen
Well, my idea of adding another slot in the default config (and a useful binding) was rejected. The state has to live *somewhere*, and Roundy's idea was the only viable one mooted. It's also the more Unixy solution of configuring the default editor. Hence using $EDITOR. Now, I suspect this could be improved. For example, I was unsure whether to default to 'emacs' or 'emacsclient'; the problem with the latter is that sometimes it's invisible, when the buffer pops up in some emacs far far away or maybe pretty inaccessible (a forgotten Emacs in a screen session?), and I was also unsure whether emacsclient would do the right thing if no Emacs was running. Another suggestion I saw is to use VISUAL, since apparently that's also used sometimes (but surely even less than EDITOR - even my extensive config files just define VISUAL=$EDITOR). So I'll send a patch for those two changes. But why have this in general? Because it was a repeated pattern in my config file; because it could be useful to others; because it's an interesting extension of RunOrRaise. And so on. If you don't see the appeal, I'm not sure I can explain it better than that. -- gwern initia POCSAG Corporate SARD PARASAR Chicago I special ^ MKDELTA