Re: [nmh-workers] Unnecessary dependency on vi???

[Ralph Corderoy]

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,
address@hidden, 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