Hi Ken, > > so a program like mail would offer two escapes (~e vs. ~v) to let > > yo invoke either. > > So ... I guess programs would look at the terminal and if your speed > was 9600 baud or greater, you'd use VISUAL, and if it was slower you'd > use EDITOR?
No, AFAIK it was always the user's choice. mail(1) had the `~e' escape and then added a `~v' one, with VISUAL and EDITOR environment variables echoing the cpp(1) macro names of the default values. Kurt Shoens, [email protected], is down as the author in BSD-1-253-gc145e9e0ab5 of https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo. For evermore, programs that only offer one means of invoking an editor have had to checking first $VISUAL, falling back to $EDITOR. :-) That reminds me, whatnow(1) needs a `visual'. -- Cheers, Ralph. https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy -- nmh-workers https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
