[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Bug#197835: [PROPOSAL]: integrated environments are allowed



On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 02:02:08AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:

> I haven't thought very much about Colin Walters' [1] points about
> editors as embeddable components yet, but if we had a distinct XEDITOR
> then we could probably support that quite sensibly by just using them
> when XEDITOR isn't set, since people whose only X applications are
> GNOMEish with an integrated editor component (for example) will have
> little reason to set it, even if they set EDITOR for terminal programs.
> I do take the point that nano in an xterm isn't the prettiest of
> defaults, but conversely I want a way to be able to tell all X
> applications that I want, say, gvim - or even 'pterm -e vi' - as my
> graphical editor without having to jump through hoops to do this for
> each desktop environment and each miscellaneous X application
> separately.

> We would also need a /usr/bin/x-editor alternative, with some scheme for
> agreeing priorities, and a sensible-x-editor program in debianutils. The
> other approach to the latter would be to modify sensible-editor to look
> at $DISPLAY � la sensible-browser, but I think that would be unwise; you
> want the condition to be whether an X application is calling the editor,
> not whether you happen to be in X, since it's frequent for a user to
> want terminal-based programs to spawn terminal-based editors even if
> they happen to be running in X (say, mutt in an xterm).
> sensible-x-editor keys the decision on the nature of the caller, which
> is more appropriate.

It seems to me that it could be integrated into sensible-editor,
provided that the controlling factor is the presence of a controlling
tty rather than the value of the $DISPLAY variable.  I definitely don't
want xterms spawning xterms on my system just because mutt invoked my
editor while running under X...

> Thus, the policy for spawning an X editor could be: (1) check XEDITOR,
> (2) use integrated editor if available, (3) run sensible-x-editor (which
> might have 'xterm -e $EDITOR' as one of its fallback choices). Would
> this keep everyone happy?

This seems like a good solution, as well.  I still suspect that with a
tty check it could be integrated into sensible-editor, but otherwise I
think this is a winner.

-- 
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer

Attachment: pgpX22QnZaZyC.pgp
Description: PGP signature


Reply to: