Set terminal editor to something user-friendly

[zstumgoren]

The default terminal editor on a fresh OS 10.10 install appears to be vim. Laptop script should configure this to be something more user-friendly such as Pico

[tthibo]

Hmm. I would be as lost with Pico as a new user would be with vim.

If we're going to go that route, why not make sure sublime is installed and make the commandline invocation the default? (Or everyone can learn three commands in vim, right?)

[zstumgoren]

Sublime is fine too. I had considered that but left it open-ended since this most affects the data analysis folks (I suspect I'm not the only devops/newsapps person customizing this).

I'd be opposed to vim as the default, however. The use cases in git-land (merge conflicts and multi-line commits) are fairly infrequent for most folks working on data projects, so it would be easy for them to forget even a small number of commands (much less grok and remember the modal editing switches). Feels like we could easily spare them this pain with a sensible default.

Better yet, we could serve all users by having the script prompt for a preferred editor (sublime, nano, pico, emacs, vim, whatev) and configure the EDITOR variable in _~/.bashprofile

Thoughts?

[myersjustinc]

I'd lean toward setting $EDITOR, personally.

[tthibo]

+1 For offering options there. People get tetchy about their editors.

[zstumgoren]

Alright! +1's all around :) Prompt for $EDITOR it is!

[myersjustinc]

Excellent! What should our options be?

The ones I'm thinking of so far (keeping in mind that we'd have to install them if they're not already provided):

• nano (pico just symlinks to nano on Macs)
• vim (uses default Vim or whatever the user's installed over it)
• emacs (uses default Emacs or whatever the user's installed over it, including GUI versions (AFAIK))
• gvim -f (Vim GUI (brew install macvim --with-override-system-vim), but set to wait for the window to exit before continuing)
• subl -w (Sublime Text, but set to wait for the window to exit before continuing; also, probably need to provide options for both ST2 (brew cask install sublime-text) and ST3 (brew tap caskroom/versions; brew cask install sublime-text3)?)

Do we have anyone using anything else? Any Atom fans in the house, for example? (I should post this issue in #data-team.)

[myersjustinc]

Oh, I just remembered Bob's a TextMate guy (mate -w, with brew cask install textmate).

[bobweston]

I haven't yet tested this. But TextMate 2 is open source and it appears can be partially installed via brew:

http://burgua.org/post/29064784750/open-source-textmate-2

brew install ragel boost pgrep multimarkdown hg
brew install --HEAD https://raw.github.com/adamv/homebrew-alt/master/head-only/ninja.rb
git clone https://github.com/textmate/textmate.git
cd textmate
./configure && ninja

To allow it to work via the terminal, we need to add this symlink:

ln -s /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/Resources/mate ~/bin/mate

https://manual.macromates.com/en/using_textmate_from_terminal.html

[myersjustinc]

I have most of this working in the editor-prompt branch. There's a menu during setup that asks for a text editor, installs that editor, and sets $EDITOR accordingly.

My two remaining concerns:

• crontab -e doesn't interpret $EDITOR the same way other programs do when the value of $EDITOR contains a flag (such as export EDITOR='subl -w'). This Stack Overflow thread suggests we might have to create a wrapper script to use in this case. (Not hard—just annoying.)

• I'm asking one question in the script ("Which editor should I install and set as $EDITOR?"), but I wonder whether I should split it into two questions:

  • "Which editor(s) should I install?" (could be several)
  • "Which editor should be your $EDITOR for commands like git commit or crontab -e?"

  For example, Bob would want TextMate installed, but he might prefer to leave Vim as his $EDITOR. (Similarly, I have the GUI Vim installed, but I leave the command-line Vim as my $EDITOR.)

  I worry this might start to be too many questions, though. (Then again, #2 probably warrants a good number of questions itself.)

Thoughts?

[zstumgoren]

+1 to multiple questions. I think you're right that folks may want multiple editors installed, and it helps to separate out the question of which editor(s) one wants installed vs. the editor of choice for $EDITOR.

Crontab is a tricky one. Sounds like the wrapper script is the general solution.

Short-term alternatives could be:

1. Restrict list of options for $EDITOR setting to options that work "out-of-the-box", with "nano" as default.
2. Allow folks to select any $EDITOR, but alert them that selecting sublime and certain other text editors will require them to explicitly override the $EDITOR env variable when working with cron: export EDITOR=nano crontab -e

I suspect that most folks on the team are generally not using crontab on their personal dev machines, so number 2 could be a livable solution. But leaving the system in a broken state makes me itch.

I'd prefer to keep this simple and just go with option 1 above. This avoids the need to create a wrapper script, and while learning vim may be a tall order, I think folks could easily manage nano on the rare occasions this comes up.

And yes, that pretty much brings us back full circle to the start of this thread :)

@tthibo thoughts?