How to set $EDITOR to something including arguments?

[dag]

Trying to configure fish for using GVim for funced:

If I set EDITOR gvim, it starts in the background which doesn't work right. If I set EDITOR gvim -f it starts the built in interactive editor. Same thing if I do set EDITOR "gvim -f". If I write a function for running gvim -f and set EDITOR to that function, same thing.

It seems the only way to do this is to write a separate shell script?

[ridiculousfish]

We were running type -f "$editor". Since there's no command 'gvim -f', this was failing.

Should be fixed here: debfc0f . Now we run type -f "$editor[1]", so you would write this:

set EDITOR gvim -f

[ridiculousfish]

Thanks for reporting this

[dag]

It works, thanks!

[dag]

Alas, a new problem. If I now do set -x EDITOR gvim -f, it is exported as gvim:-f. I could probably work around this by exporting $VISUAL instead, but maybe it would be better to rename $EDITOR to something lower case, keeping with the convention of upper case variables being exported?

Note that for example, env EDITOR="gvim -f" git config --edit --global works fine; maybe fish should be consistent with how other programs interpret $EDITOR? Make it a single string, and tokenize it on whitespace for arguments. Kind of ugly, but seems to be what others do.

[dag]

Actually I'm not sure what git is doing here, as it seems to accept even quoted arguments. Presumably it either includes a simple parser for this, or it is passing the string to a shell via -c or something. Maybe fish could simply eval?

[ridiculousfish]

You're right...EDITOR should be exported without colons. So either it should not be an array, or it should be special cased.

[dag]

(Re-open? I can't do it.)

[ridiculousfish]

fish does just eval...the problem is that fish tries to protect you from yourself by checking whether the command is valid, and falling back to its own editor if it is not.

Try it now, with the new commit 5e9ca72 and no arrays, like so:

set -x EDITOR 'vim -f'

[dag]

Yep it works, thanks again!