Ken Hornstein wrote:
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).
none of us knew. here's what "crontab" does for its -e mode.
#if defined(_PATH_VI)
# define EDITOR _PATH_VI
#else
# define EDITOR "/usr/ucb/vi"
#endif
...
if ((!(editor = getenv("VISUAL")))
&& (!(editor = getenv("EDITOR")))
) {
editor = EDITOR;
}
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