[sf-perl] Debugger goodness

Joseph Brenner doom at kzsu.stanford.edu
Sat Mar 4 00:22:12 PST 2006


Quinn Weaver <qw at sf.pm.org> wrote:

> David Alban wrote:
> 
> > [Useful debugger tips]
> 
> >   export EDITOR=vim
> 
> Just to be pedantic, some BSD systems expect you to use VISUAL instead
> of editor (and commands like 'crontab -e' don't honor EDITOR).
> So you should always do something like this in your .bash_profile:
> 
> export EDITOR=whatever
> export VISUAL=$EDITOR
> 
> Silly, huh?

The emacs-way of doing this is more like:

  export EDITOR=emacsclient

And in your .emacs you put the line: 

  (server-start)

Then when something tries to invoke an editor, it pops open a window 
in your existing emacs, rather than starting another one.  

This is particularly convienient if the command that invoked an editor
was issued in an emacs subshell.  E.g. say you're running your database
shell inside an emacs subshell, and you use the "edit" command to modify
the last SQL you typed in: it should appear right where you're working.

(Note: there's a newer substitute for "emacsclient" called 
"gnu-client". I don't know what the advantage is supposed to be.)



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