Bug#197835: [PROPOSAL]: integrated environments are allowed
On Wed, 2003-06-18 at 15:56, Chris Waters wrote:
> If the history of the vi vs. emacs flamewars teach us anything, it's
> that most experienced users would rather fight than switch when it
> comes to editors. Frankly, if some stupid app insists on ignoring
> what I've defined as the One True $EDITOR(tm), I would take it out
> back, shoot it, drive a stake through its heart, chop off its head,
> fill its mouth with garlic, and bury it under the crossroads at
> midnight. That's how evil I think this proposal is.
You forgot to do this under a full moon and with three black candles,
otherwise it comes back to life.
> $PAGER is a different case. I might consider a proposal that $PAGER
> should only be used for terminal apps.
Yes, I think this is pretty clear.
> But touch my $EDITOR at your peril!
I sympathize a bit with your position here. But let's take the case of
Evolution (in which I am typing this mail). It could in theory spawn an
external editor to do the work of editing an email. But it's not
entirely clear to me it should do that by default if EDITOR is set.
Evolution's editor is integrated to the same extent that say Mozilla's
form editor is. I imagine that Evolution upstream would have a tepid
reaction at best to the thought of using $EDITOR.
It is ironic though that Colin accepts Mozilla's form editor not
spawning $EDITOR, because Mozilla's form editor is a constant source of
frustration for me :)
Now that I really think about it though, I can't think of another place
in GNOME that really directly uses an editor in such a way that it would
be sanely replaceable with $EDITOR. GNOME does have a component
embedding system, where an app can ask for any component capable of
editing say text/plain, but I can't think of any prominent applications
really using that yet. So maybe the $EDITOR issue is somewhat academic
at the moment, at least for GNOME. I don't know about KDE.
But lots of GNOME applications *do* spawn a browser, so $BROWSER is not
an academic issue.
So far it seems to me like what we're heading towards is a situation
where PAGER is ignored by all X applications, setting EDITOR overrides
most but not all places, and BROWSER overrides all. It just seems weird
to me. I'd rather that for integrated environments, all of those
environment variables are ignored (i.e. the current situation).
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