On Wed, Jun 18, 2003 at 01:02:37AM -0400, Colin Walters wrote: > On Tue, 2003-06-17 at 20:28, Colin Watson wrote: > > > I think this is very bad. At the moment policy says that my EDITOR and > > PAGER variables have priority over what random programs think is a good > > idea, which I think is excellent. > > Yes...but the idea is if programs have a preferred version for a > reason. Integrated environments like GNOME and KDE have very good > reasons to prefer a particular editor, namely the one they ship with.
Normally they don't have a good reason, except that they can rely on the existance of that editor. *If* I set my $EDITOR variable, I prefer this editor to be used, no matter whether I'm using a console program, mutt, or Evolution. If I wanted to use a different editor, I would set my EDITOR variable differently. Please keep in mind that it is important that the user should be in control of his or her environment. When I set the EDITOR variable, but this is not honored, I don't feel like I'm in control. Please keep also in mind that there is a reason people set the EDITOR variable: they have an editor, which they are used to, which they can handle, which they have configured to their needs, and therefore want to use. It is a bad idea to force users to learn a different editor for different tasks. Of course it might be a good idea to enhance sensible-editor and co to use a different editor in different environment by default (i.e. if the $EDITOR and $VISUAL variables are not set). Alternatively desktops could check if EDITOR and VISUAL are set and if not set them to their preferred editor. - Sebastian, speaking as a user of vim, XEmacs, and sometimes gedit
