Re: Running an editor from ANSI C

On 2024-06-06, Malcolm McLean <malcolm.arthur.mclean@gmail.com> wrote:

I want to run nano (or vi, or ed), in a shell running a pure ansi C
program. So the way to do it is to create a file, write the text you
want edit to it, them call system("nano readme.txt"). Nano then grabs
the  cobsole, which is what you want. You then read the file to get the
edited data.

In the TXR project, I took Antirez's Linenoise library and did a lot
of work on it. One of the features I added is Ctrl-X Ctrl-E to edit
the input in an external editor.

There are some non-standard-C bitws in it, but the main gist of it is
as you say. The temporary file is written using some I/O functions in a
callback API used by linenoise and the editor is run via system().

https://www.kylheku.com/cgit/txr/tree/linenoise/linenoise.c

Function to look for is edit_in_editor.

In that code I made the decision to try to plant the temporary file
in the user's home directory, or else just the current directory
if the home directory can't be identified for whatever reason.

--
TXR Programming Language: http://nongnu.org/txr
Cygnal: Cygwin Native Application Library: http://kylheku.com/cygnal
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