Re: Adding with-editor to Emacs?

[Manuel Giraud via "Emacs development discussions." <emacs-devel@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Jonas Bernoulli <jonas@bernoul.li>
>> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org, rms@gnu.org
>> Date: Fri, 01 Sep 2023 19:44:53 +0200
>> 
>> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> 
>> > I'm probably missing something because if all we want is to allow
>> > child processes to use the current Emacs session as their editor, we
>> > just need to inject some environment variables into
>> > process-environment when running those child processes, and start the
>> > server.
>> 
>> That's the core of what with-editor does.  Additionally
>> 
>> - It tries hard to find the correct emacsclient to use.
>
> See below: I don't think I understand why this has to be "hard".
>
>> - It implements a "sleeping editor".  This is a shell script, which
>>   outputs a request on stdout and then waits to be told to return.
>>   With-editor use a process filter too look for that output and when
>>   it sees it, it responds in a similar fashion to server.el.  This
>>   is useful because makes it possible to do this over Tramp.  (I
>>   believe this could also be done using regular emacsclient+server.el,
>>   but that is difficult to setup and a security risk if not done
>>   correctly.
>
> If we want a better/safer client-server connections for remote hosts,
> it should be handled in Tramp, I think.
>
>> - It provides some convenience functionality to use this from various
>>   shells running inside Emacs.
>
> Can you provide details?  The above is too terse for me to understand
> the functionality.

Just my one 2 cents datapoint:

I have this line in my init.el
(add-hook 'eshell-mode-hook 'with-editor-export-editor)

and now, I can do a standard Unix "crontab -e" or "vipw" to edit those
special files from a remote eshell (be it via sudo, ssh whatever).
-- 
Manuel Giraud