Re: Interpreting EDITOR/VISUAL environment variables.

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Yann Dirson <ydirson@altern.org> writes:

> On Wed, Aug 01, 2007 at 10:12:13AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> We recently normalized the script callers not to splice at all
>> (the scripts were hand-rolling "the VISUAL or EDITOR or vi" and
>> slightly differently).  It obviously has negative (i.e. setting
>> EDITOR to "emacsclient --alternate-editor vi" does not work) as
>> well as positive side (i.e. "/home/dak/My Programs/editor" would
>> work).
>
> And, indeed, --alternate-editor could be supplemented by another
> envvar to be able to work in our situation.

It is already.  But if git is pretty much alone in breaking a setup
that is working everywhere else, is having a workaround available
really a good excuse for not doing the right thing?

> Maybe the various emacsen vendors would be willing to integrate such
> a patch ?

Actually, it is a nuisance because nobody remembers this variable.  It
is called (looking in the Emacs manual, using the index to find
emacsclient, following a link after two pages to the invocation, going
down two pages again) ALTERNATE_EDITOR.  It does not even _mention_
Emacs or emacsclient in its name.  The "-a" option is easier to
remember.

So yes, emacsclient has an environment hook making it possible to work
around git's idiosyncratic behavior here.  But should it really be
necessary?

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum