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Frederick888 / external-editor-revived

External Editor Revived is a Thunderbird MailExtension which allows editing emails in programs such as Vim, Neovim, Emacs, etc.
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Feature Request: Allow arbitrary commands #117

Closed lorenzleutgeb closed 10 months ago

lorenzleutgeb commented 1 year ago

Description

Your code works under the assumption that people will choose a bash compatible shell for the "shell" configuration parameter. This is evidenced by the following constants:

https://github.com/Frederick888/external-editor-revived/blob/26cab0a4e5006202df3d25d110133a7e22e03ec7/src/main.rs#L16-L17

I'd argue that this is an arbitrary constraint, and you should consider lifting it, allowing people to do as they please. By that, I mean that you should remove insertion of DEFAULT_SHELL_ARGS. Rename the configuration parameter to e.g. "program" and directly pass it to Command::new.

People that use could still do so by specifying (the path to) Bash as program, and using e.g. -C "vim /path/to/temp.eml" as their "command template".

For example, I am personally using Visual Studio Code as editor. I don't actually need MinGW or Bash to do that. But I spend quite some time and look at the source code to figure out a work around (which is linked below).

You could still include predefined configurations with the extension.

Environment

Configuration

Shell: C:\Users\lorenz\external-editor-revived.bat Command template: /path/to/temp.eml

Contents of external-editor-revived.bat: https://gist.github.com/lorenzleutgeb/2c76e24f15ea70d4f1102bbd5111d4e2

Frederick888 commented 10 months ago

It's not an 'arbitrary constraint'. Parsing command line arguments is very complex (like, it's a large chunk of shell programs' functionality). Unless I replace the Shell setting with a variable-sized list of inputs to basically ask users to manually do this, which is probably gonna be a lot more confusing and user unfriendly, I simply cannot translate a single string to a Command::new call easily (otherwise Command::new would have already supported that, why bother asking for a list of arguments? :) ).

For example, how do you parse /bin/weird-shell --title="Hello, \"World\"" -c <current command template here> -- 'foo bar' foo bar?

And btw you don't need a Bash-compatible shell. It only needs to be POSIX-compatible. People also had positive experience with pwsh under Windows: #78.