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<p>This text is a work in progress—highly subject to
change—and may not accurately describe any released
version of the Apache™ Subversion® software.
Bookmarking or otherwise referring others to this page is
probably not such a smart idea. Please visit
<a href="http://www.svnbook.com/">http://www.svnbook.com/</a>
for stable versions of this book.</p>
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<h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a id="svn.advanced.externaleditors"></a>Using External Editors</h2>
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<p>The most obvious way to get data into Subversion is through
the addition of files to version control, committing changes to
those files, and so on. But other pieces of
information besides merely versioned file data live in your
Subversion repository. Some of these bits of
information—commit log messages, lock comments, and some
property values—tend to be textual in nature and are
provided explicitly by users. Most of this information can be
provided to the Subversion command-line client using the
<code class="option">--message</code> (<code class="option">-m</code>) and
<code class="option">--file</code> (<code class="option">-F</code>) options with the
appropriate subcommands.</p>
<p>Each of these options has its pros and cons. For example,
when performing a commit, <code class="option">--file</code>
(<code class="option">-F</code>) works well if you've already prepared a
text file that holds your commit log message. If you didn't,
though, you can use <code class="option">--message</code>
(<code class="option">-m</code>) to provide a log message on the command
line. Unfortunately, it can be tricky to compose anything more
than a simple one-line message on the command line. Users want
more flexibility—multiline, free-form log message editing
on demand.</p>
<p>Subversion supports this by allowing you to specify an
external text editor that it will launch as necessary
to give you a more powerful input mechanism for this textual
metadata. There are several ways to tell Subversion which
editor you'd like use. Subversion checks the following things,
in the order specified, when it wants to launch such an
editor:</p>
<div class="orderedlist">
<ol class="orderedlist" type="1">
<li class="listitem">
<p><code class="literal">--editor-cmd</code> command-line option</p>
</li>
<li class="listitem">
<p><code class="literal">SVN_EDITOR</code> environment variable</p>
</li>
<li class="listitem">
<p><code class="literal">editor-cmd</code> runtime configuration option</p>
</li>
<li class="listitem">
<p><code class="literal">VISUAL</code> environment variable</p>
</li>
<li class="listitem">
<p><code class="literal">EDITOR</code> environment variable</p>
</li>
<li class="listitem">
<p>Possibly, a fallback value built into the Subversion
libraries (not present in the official builds)</p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
<p>The value of any of these options or variables is the
beginning of a command line to be executed by the shell.
Subversion appends to that command line a space and the pathname
of a temporary file to be edited. So, to be used with
Subversion, the configured or specified editor needs to support
an invocation in which its last command-line parameter is a file
to be edited, and it should be able to save the file in place
and return a zero exit code to indicate success.</p>
<p>As noted, external editors can be used to provide commit log
messages to any of the committing subcommands (such as
<span class="command"><strong>svn commit</strong></span> or <span class="command"><strong>import</strong></span>,
<span class="command"><strong>svn mkdir</strong></span> or <span class="command"><strong>delete</strong></span> when
provided a URL target, etc.), and Subversion will try to
launch the editor automatically if you don't specify either of
the <code class="option">--message</code> (<code class="option">-m</code>) or
<code class="option">--file</code> (<code class="option">-F</code>) options. The
<span class="command"><strong>svn propedit</strong></span> command is built almost entirely
around the use of an external editor. And beginning in version
1.5, Subversion will also use the configured external text
editor when the user asks it to launch an editor during
interactive conflict resolution. Oddly, there doesn't appear to
be a way to use external editors to interactively provide lock
comments.</p>
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<p>You are reading <em>Version Control with Subversion</em> (for
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and C. Michael Pilato.</p>
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