Re: [9fans] Using Acme as an external Editor

["J.R. Mauro" <jrm8005@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 2:22 PM, Russ Cox<rsc@swtch.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 11:06 AM, Tim Newsham<newsham@lava.net> wrote:
>>> Is there some idiom or method for using Acme as an external editor to some
>>> other program? Say I want to use it as the editor that is spawned when I do
>>> a CVS commit to a system; how would I do this, or can this even be done? I'm
>>> using plan9ports, but I don't know how much of this question relates to
>>> what.
>>
>> I was playing with this exact problem recently. There's an easy way to send
>> a file to acme for editing -- the plumber.  There's a downside, it doesn't
>> wait for the editor to save or complete.  So.. you could plumb the file and
>> then wait for a save to happen, somehow, or you can write another program
>> that forces a new acme window with the contents of the file and waits for it
>> to either Put or Del.  I wrote a small program to do this recently (see the
>> thread: http://9fans.net/archive/2009/06/290) which was a bit hacky, but
>> worked.  I solicited some feedback on some questions and got some good
>> advice from Russ (http://9fans.net/archive/2009/06/292) but havent yet gone
>> back and applied it.
>
> I don't think you need to be that fancy.
> Lorenzo Bolla already pointed out E in this thread,
> and it exists exactly for this purpose.
>
> http://swtch.com/plan9port/man/man1/sam.html
> (description of E is at the end)
>
> Russ
>
>

One caveat about E: if you're paranoid like I am and save your file
many times while editing, E will not be terribly friendly until you
train yourself to save only when finished. (This is not a criticism of
E, it is merely a warning to people with my kind of idiosyncrasies)