Re: What's the difference between sensible-utils and native debian Alternatives?
On Sat 27 Jun 2015 at 16:49:15 +0200, Sven Arvidsson wrote:
> On Sat, 2015-06-27 at 16:58 +0300, Jayson Willson wrote:
> > Hello. Could you please tell me, what is the difference between, for
> > example, /usr/bin/editor (which will be a symling to an editor
> > chosen with update-alternatives --config editor) and
> > /usr/bin/sensible-editor? What about pager and sensible-pager? I do
> > not get the practical difference.
> > Thank you.
>
> That's a good question! :)
>
> From simply skimming through the scripts, it seems to mostly be an easy
> way to set preferred applications through environment variables $PAGER,
> $EDITOR etc.
That's the basic idea. But note that not all the preferred applications
are set through environment variables, at least not as a matter of
course. The one for an editor, for example.
> I guess as a per-user setting instead of system-wide through
> alternatives?
The OP should imagine he does not have root access and likes to use nano
for his editor. /usr/bin/editor is a link into the alternatives system
and may point to vim. /usr/bin/sensible-editor first looks for the file
~/.selected_editor and gives him a choice of editors if it does not
exist.
A script for calling a file to read should use sensible-editor, not
editor
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