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

[Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com>]

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