[Rd] Is it advisable/possible to default on Linux to an EDITOR that actually exists?

[Simon Urbanek]

Michael,

vi is the only editor that is part of the POSIX standard. Embedded systems have built-in support only for vi (e.g., busybox) so if a system has any editor support at all it is  most likely to be vi - it is ubiquitous which is why it's the most logical default. (FWIW no distributions I know come with emacs by default because it's too heavy, but all come with vi).

If you use stripped-down images (obviously no longer standards-compliant) then you don't have any editor so it's moot. If you have preference for another editor then you should set EDITOR or VISUAL - it's just a default when neither the system nor user doesn't declare their preference. I don't think R should be fishing for random programs that may or may not be editors at run-time.

Cheers,
Simon


> On Dec 11, 2024, at 5:08 AM, Michael Chirico <michaelchirico4 using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> It looks like R has defaulted to using 'vi' for file.edit() (via
> EDITOR since ~24 years ago[1][2].
> 
> These days I think it is much more common to write code from
> lightweight environments, e.g. Docker files which strip all
> unnecessary commands. On such machines, it is not safe to assume 'vi'
> is installed, and it's not uncommon to encounter an issue like I did
> again today[3] where you or some other tool call file.edit() directly
> or implicitly and hit a clunky error.
> 
> Is there something better to do here? A "standard" Linux distribution
> will come with vi, emacs, nano, probably many others. Should
> `file.edit()` iterate over an ordered list to find the first that
> exists? Should it at least error if
> (!nzchar(Sys.which(Sys.getenv("EDITOR"))))?
> 
> Mike C
> 
> PS I do see some somewhat recent discussion[4] on EDITOR but it
> focuses on the EDITOR default in non-interactive() sessions.
> 
> [1] https://github.com/r-devel/r-svn/commit/b294ee2cef3d9292d578b062b80d59f372cf34b2#diff-1cbaac4768fd110525ba9086cb7a684aaf2c6555389c5446c913effbfec90c85
> [2] https://github.com/r-devel/r-svn/blob/71a2e968f4453858aadc1531a3774c011a6f9f49/doc/NEWS.0#L140-L141
> [3] https://github.com/r-lib/usethis/pull/2088
> [4] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2023-July/082720.html
> 
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