Question

I am writing a terminal-based application, but I want the user to be able to edit certain text data in a separate editor. For example, if the user chooses to edit the list of current usernames, the list should open as a text file in the user’s favorite editor (vim, gedit, etc.). This will probably be an environment variable such as $MYAPPEDITOR. This is similar to the way commit messages work in svn.

Is the best way to do this to create a temporary file in /tmp, and read it in when the editor process is terminated? Or is there a better way to approach this problem?

Answer 1

There’s already a $EDITOR variable, which is extremely standard and I have seen it working on a wide variety of unixes. Also, vi is always an option on any flavor of unix.

Debian has a sensible-editor command that invokes $EDITOR if it can, or falls back to some standard ones otherwise. Freedesktop.org has an xdg-open command that will detect which desktop environment is running and open the file with the associated application. As far as I know, sensible-editor doesn’t exist on other distributions, and of course xdg-open will fail in a text-only environment, but it couldn’t hurt to try as many options as possible, if you think it’s important that a desktop user can see their happy shiny gedit or kate instead of scary old vi or nano. 😉

The way crontab and sudoedit work is also by making a file in /tmp. git puts it under .git, and svn actually puts it in the current directory (not /tmp).