Editor Client

EditorClient is a small application which supports the ODB protocol developed by Bare Bones Software: and runs a shell command to start an editor in response. It was originally written for use with Emacs, but can be used with any editor which can be started from the command line and blocks until it has finished editing the file.

Environment Variables

What editor to open and how can be customized by setting environment variables (or by editing EditorClientWorker.py). The variables in question in order of preference are:

• EDITOR_CLIENT_COMMAND can be used to specify the whole command line. In this case it must be ready to print linenum and filename. See below.
• EMACSCLIENT is used for the editor and EMACS for the alternate.
• Defaults to /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient for emacsclient and empty for alternate.

If EDITOR_CLIENT_COMMAND is set it should be something ready for Python string formatting taking linenum and filename as the keys (you can ignore linenum if your editor doesn't support it.) Setting EMACSCLIENT and EMACS will produce the same as if you set EDITOR_CLIENT_COMMAND to:

"$EMACSCLIENT -c -a '$EMACS' +%(linenum)s '%(filename)s'"

A Note on Environment Variables in OS X

Working with environment variables in OS X can be confusing since exporting them in .bashrc for example is ineffective. Instead you must set them in ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist. Brian D Foy wrote about a way to update/create this file based on your shell environment (and which can be run in .bashrc for example).