Subject: Re: bug#44272: guix edit doesn't work when $EDITOR is set to "kate"

From: zimoun <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2020 15:52:18 +0100

Dear Nathan,

> Easy solution, set $EDITOR to "gedit" ;)

Or Emacs. ;-)

> The reason why kate "doesn't work" when opening files as specified by
> `guix edit`, is that kate apparently can't handle the "$EDITOR +$N
> $FILE" syntax, where $N is the number of lines to skip.  It instead
> opens two files, one of which will likely always be empty.  This should
> probably be reported as bug to kate unless that works upstream and
> somehow guix messes up this feature.

Instead ’kate’ use ’--line/-l’ and not ’+N’.  You could wrap, something
along these lines:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
#!/bin/sh

kate -l $(echo "$*" | tr "+" " ")
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

then:

  export EDITOR=/path/to/kate-wrapper.sh
  guix edit emacs

works (with ’/path/to/kate-wrapper.sh’ executable).  Well, the wrapper
could be better, obviously. :-)

As Leo said, it does not seem a bug on the Guix side.  Well, what could
be done on the Guix side?  What do you suggest?

All the best,
simon