Re: default editor

[M Douglas McIlroy <m.douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu>]

Eric and Adam,

Many thanks for so thoroughly exploring my query. I have long lived
with the limitations of
invoking Windows apps from Cygwin. Fortuitously I could work around
them without resorting
to "command prompt", though clearly that isn't always possible. And
you have shed light
on the difficulty of the opposite: invoking Cygwin apps from Windows.

Doug

On Mon, Feb 8, 2021 at 5:03 AM Adam Dinwoodie <adam@dinwoodie.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 7 Feb 2021 at 21:59, Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com> wrote:
> > By the way, it's also possible to install Cygwin's Git from the Cygwin
> > installer rather than attempting to use the Git provided by the
> > Git-For-Windows project. The combination of Cygwin `ed` and Cygwin
> > `git` works just fine (in my tests) once you configure `ed` as the Git
> > editor either by setting GIT_EDITOR or EDITOR environment variables to
> > `ed -l` or by configuring git itself:
> >
> >     git config --global --add core.config 'ed -l'
> >
> > (You would want to uninstall Git-For-Windows, too, if you have it installed.)
>
> As the Cygwin Git maintainer, I'd strongly recommend this approach:
> either use a Cygwin toolchain or a Git for Windows one, rather than
> trying to combine the two. While Cygwin and the Git for Windows
> environment share common ancestry, they have substantial differences
> arising from the fact that Cygwin generally attempts to provide an
> environment that's as close to Unix-like as possible, while Git for
> Windows is aiming for compatibility with native Windows applications.
> Differences in handling paths and return codes are to be expected.
>
> I expect it is possible to use a Cygwin editor with Git for Windows,
> but I don't think it's an expected use case, and I'm not aware of
> anyone else having produced and published documentation of the
> configuration and wrapper scripts I imagine you would need to convert
> between the two interfaces.
>
> Adam