Better mechanism to choose the default editor (and avoid vi if possible)?

[Chris Green]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 09:17:27PM +0200, Manuel Jacob wrote:
> On 2020-06-08 15:43, PIERRE AUGIER wrote:
> 
> For the record, I agree that vi is a terrible default. People unfamiliar
> with it are lost. People familiar with it will probably use at least vim. I
> don’t know anyone who uses vi. For me as a vim user, vi is confusing because
> it’s a bit of vim, but it’s not vim.
> 
That's why I use vile, it's closer to 'real' vi and I used to work on
lots of different systems (DEC Ultrix, Sparc, etc.) where it was was
handy not to be too different.


> Still, I don’t think that Mercurial should make this decision. I’m sure that
> someone could come up with reasons why nano is not a good default and the
> same for any other editor. If you start this kind of discussion, you end up
> with people discussing their favorite vi clone on this mailing list (this
> actually happened).
> 
Yes, agreed, editor selection should be OS related rather than done by
aaplications.


> I would prefer if instead of falling back to vi, Mercurial shows a nice
> error message describing how to set an editor.
> 
Yes, but it must be possible to select vi.

-- 
Chris Green