External vim editor on windows

[silverqx]

Hi,

I'm not able to setup up an external vim editor on windows. I'm using mc 4.8.24.

mc correctly picks up EDITOR env. variable, but the final command looks like this:

vim /C E:/another_dir/file.txt

So vim tries to open two files:

• first file or in this case it tries to open /C folder at a current drive
• and second file E:/another_dir/file.txt

The second problem is that file is not quoted, so when the command line looks like this:

vim /C E:/some dir/file.txt

Then it tries to open two folders and one file dir/file.txt.

I have also tried to add External parameters as is described in man pages:

[External editor or viewer parameters]
vim=%filename +%lineno

But without success, it looks like mc ignores this section, in the manpages is written: "The option name should be equal to the name (full pathname) of external editor or viewer."

I have tried various combinations.

The problem is also described here: https://superuser.com/questions/1119591/defining-midnight-commanders-external-editor-on-windows I have also created an issue on mc's trac issue track and some good guy tell me that a dedicated project exists for windows support, ticket is here.

Anyway, it is not crucial whether [External editor or viewer parameters] works or not on windows, would be absolutely enough to correctly generate external editor command on windows.

That means remove that /C parameter from the beginning or replace it with -C because startup parameters for vim have to start with a dash and quote filepaths.

[adamyg]

target build-221

[silverqx]

I have tested it, and now the generated command doesn't contain /C, but when the file contains whitespace it fails, the generated command looks like this:

vim E:/some dir/file.txt

So it opens empty file, still doesn't work correctly, it has to be quoted when it contains dangerous characters. @adamyg

[adamyg]

Further work required to quote args

[silverqx]

Yesterday, before I had gone to the bed, I have little looked at source code on GitHub ( not in an ide, so it might not be accurate ) and it looks like the file paths are passed without quotations for win and also for UNIX systems, on UNIX it works without problems. ( I checked this on my Gentoo install, but I will not describe it here ).

The call chain I have find out is edit_cmd() -> do_edit() -> edit_file_at_line() -> execute_external_editor_or_viewer() ... -> w32_shell(), ..., the path what_vpath which is obtained by fname = vfs_path_from_str (selection (current_panel)->fname); here is unquoted.

This path should be quoted somewhere around execute_external_editor_or_viewer(), I practically don't know anything about mc source code and it was 15min lookup to source code on github, so I can still be wrong. 🙂🤙 @adamyg

[adamyg]

Build-222 pending

[eugenov]

At least I was able to set Notepad3 as external editor with env variable EDITOR. It works as it should.

[eugenov]

Maybe does one know how to let mc open multiple files with external editor? Now mc panels are blocked (black screen) when file is opened with editor. Something like "&" at the end of command...

[adamyg]

Neither options are currently available; open an enhancement ticket and i'll consider