not all terminals were capable of doing the cursor addressing needed
for any given screen-oriented editor. so the user was given the ability
to configure two editors -- likely "ed" and "vi", though some folks may
have used emacs or "se" :-). some programs had separate commands for
invoking the two. (for instance, see ~e and ~v in the mailx man page.)
Ok, so I get in the mailx case there was ~e and ~v. But how did other
programs know when to use VISUAL and when to use EDITOR? I guess that's
the real confusing part to me; it was never clear to me how that decision
was made (all of the examples I ever found checked VISUAL then fell back
to EDITOR).
--Ken
_______________________________________________
Nmh-workers mailing list
Nmh-workers(_at_)nongnu(_dot_)org
https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers