Hi Ken,
so a program like mail would offer two escapes (~e vs. ~v) to let
yo invoke either.
So ... I guess programs would look at the terminal and if your speed
was 9600 baud or greater, you'd use VISUAL, and if it was slower you'd
use EDITOR?
No, AFAIK it was always the user's choice. mail(1) had the `~e' escape
and then added a `~v' one, with VISUAL and EDITOR environment variables
echoing the cpp(1) macro names of the default values. Kurt Shoens,
kurt(_at_)ucbvax(_dot_)Berkeley(_dot_)EDU, is down as the author in
BSD-1-253-gc145e9e0ab5 of
https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo.
For evermore, programs that only offer one means of invoking an editor
have had to checking first $VISUAL, falling back to $EDITOR. :-)
That reminds me, whatnow(1) needs a `visual'.
--
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy
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