On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 3:11 PM, Lennart Poettering <lenn...@poettering.net> wrote: > On Fri, 17.10.14 14:29, Mantas Mikulėnas (graw...@gmail.com) wrote: > >> > Technically proficient people will set $EDITOR or $VISUAL >> > anyway. Non-technical people won't. Non-technical people are likel to >> > be totally lost in vi/vim. For those folks probably nano makes a >> > better choice, simply because it shows an explanation of they >> > supported keys at the bottom of the screen. >> > >> > Hence, I think doing a logic like this would make sense: >> > >> > 1) if $EDITOR is set, use it >> > 2) otherwise: if $VISUAL is set, use it >> > 3) otherwise: if "nano" exists, use it >> > 4) otherwise: if "vim" exists, use it >> > 5) otherwise: if "vi" exists, use it >> >> The list of editors seems fine. >> >> Normally $VISUAL would be first, followed by $EDITOR... >> >> (But in practice nobody sets them to different values anyway, since no >> programs aside from mailx care about the distinction. So it's fine >> either way, and just ignoring $VISUAL would be just as good.) > > Is there a real distinction between $VISUAL and $EDITOR? environ(7) > makes no distinction, have any better docs that clarify the supposed > distinction?
It's much older than me, but as far as I know, one would have had $EDITOR set to 'ed' or 'ex' for "dumb" typewriter-based terminals (which were used before CRT terminals were a thing) and $VISUAL to 'vi' or 'emacs' for CRT-based terminals (which could show full-screen programs), and programs would start the right one depending on $TERM value. But these days, I haven't seen any program (other than mailx) actually care about the differences; they pretty much always go $VISUAL || $EDITOR || something || something || vi. So most people have both set to the same editor, just in case. So I'd safely get rid of $VISUAL -- Mantas Mikulėnas <graw...@gmail.com> _______________________________________________ systemd-devel mailing list systemd-devel@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel