Apparently the BSD way to specify editor ($EDITOR / $VISUAL / mailcap) sucks pretty bad. I reckon mailcap is basically a good idea, but doesn't work very well, and could use some occam's razor. I hazard to guess that the freedesktop people have reimplemented it rather than fixed it :/
Anyway, as it is I'd say a user ~/.mailcap combined with edit(1) would be a better way to set a custom editor than $EDITOR, in a GUI environment. You can't go launching xterms in $EDITOR. But you'd better set a handler for application/octet-stream, as it's too stupid to guess if something is a text file :/ Need to get together with the file(1) people. Sam
