OK, so this is caused by my lack of knowledge of how emacs operates.
Really, we are talking about two editors here, one a tty-application
and the other an X-windows application. They happen to be called by
the same command invocation, so there must be something in the
environment that decides which gets run (or at least in which mode it
gets run). Wouldn't it be nicer if sage would look at the environment
and predict the behaviour of emacs? Does emacs decide what to do based
on the DISPLAY variable? Does emacs always do that? How about people
that have an older, non-X-windows aware emacs?
I understand that the "bg=" hack is a quick way of getting the
configurability you want, but frankly, I would find it hard to explain
the existence of that option independent of the very particular usage
scenario you describe.
Jf we want sage to pop up "the appropriate editor", the user should
not be required to give an extra option like that. In the model I
proposed (which clearly is inconvenient to you, so we need to see how
to wrap this), the solution would be to put into your init.sage
(basically following a suggestion Justin made):
if os.environ.haskey('DISPLAY'):
sage.misc.edit_module.set_edit_template('emacs +${line} ${file}
&')
else:
sage.misc.edit_module.set_edit_template('emacs +${line} ${file}')
So, if you're sure that this does for emacs what you want, we could
wrap this into the set_editor command instead of the "bg=" option.
Then the appropriate magic gets executed if either 'EDITOR=emacs' or
if set_editor('emacs'), and currently even if edit(..,
editor='emacs').
Guessing a user's configuration and preferences will stay hackish
guesswork. I'm happy to put some guesses into set_editor. Ultimately,
however, people should just put personal configuration stuff into
init.sage. (either that or every user patches sage.misc.edit_module
until it is an encyclopedia of editor invocation sequences)
Another solution would be two possible "editor templates": emacs-fg
and emacs-bg.
On Oct 23, 11:03 pm, "William Stein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 10/22/07, Nils Bruin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > See:
>
> >http://sagetrac.org/sage_trac/ticket/768
>
> > I have updated the attached patch to be clean against 2.8.8.1. When I
> > checked the edit() command in sage 2.8.8.1, I realized it was really
> > broken -- It doesn't work if EDITOR is unset in the environment. The
> > patch attached to the trac ticket is supposed to fix that.
>
> I'm generally happy with this patch, though I don't agree with removing
> the bg option. Perhaps you're removing that functionality because
> your particular workflow is more rigid than mine. For example, I use
> emacs quite a lot, both in a console (especially when I login to other
> machines), but also as a popup separate application. When I use emacs
> in console mode, putting the editor in the background is very frusting,
> and doesn't work at all. When I use emacs as a separate popup application, it
> is very very frustrating if the console session freezes, since often the
> reason
> I'm popping up the editor is to create some examples in the console and
> paste them into the docstring of a function. In both cases the command
> name is exactly the same "emacs".
>
> So please change the patch back to have the bg option.
>
> This is a lot like black on white versus white on black. Most people
> exclusively
> use one or the other mode, and it's impossible to know which from the
> application's point of view. So applications have to support both and make
> it easy to switch between generating colors for each. I often switch between
> using emacs and vi, both in window and console mode, and between black
> on white and white on black, depending on my mood, eye strain, computing
> I'm logged into, etc. So it needs to be easy to support changing modes.
> The bg= option to edit is 3 lines of code and does just that; it allows one to
> very easily override automatic defaults on a per-use basis.
>
> -- William
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel
URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
