To wean myself off using vi for quick edits, I've aliased "vi" to "eve" in the shell, and set EDITOR to point to "eve" also.  The "eve" program is a re-implementation of emacsclient in Perl; the only difference is that it execs "vi" if there isn't already an emacsserver running.

-PeterHousel-
[new]
You know, modern emacsclient binaries have a -a switch, so you could accomplish the same thing with "emacsclient -a /usr/bin/vi $*", then you don't have to launch perl everytime you want to edit a file.

-Rawb-
[new]
Yes, but you can't set EDITOR to "emacsclient -a ..." because a lot of software calls execlp($EDITOR, $EDITOR, NULL). I.e. they don't handle arguments.

-- Rui Paulo

[new]
I believe the suggestion is using this instead of Perl:
{{{
  echo -e "#\!/bin/bash\n\nemacsclient -a /usr/bin/vi \$*" > /usr/local/bin/eve
  EDITOR=eve
}}}

----
<pre>
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

# eve - Edit with VI or Emacs
# Good as a value for EDITOR or as the target of a 'vi' alias
# If there is an emacsserver already running then connect to it, otherwise
# run /usr/bin/vi.

use strict;
use POSIX;
use Socket;
use Sys::Hostname;

socket(EMACS, AF_UNIX, SOCK_STREAM, 0) || die "unix domain socket: $!";

my $server = sprintf "/tmp/esrv%d-%s", &POSIX::geteuid(), hostname;

my ($dev, $ino, $mode, $nlink, $uid, $gid, $rdev, $size, $atime, $mtime,
    $ctime, $blksize, $blocks) = stat($server);

if(!defined $uid || $uid != &POSIX::geteuid()) {
    exec "/usr/bin/vi", @ARGV;
}

if(connect(EMACS, sockaddr_un $server) < 0) {
    exec "/usr/bin/vi", @ARGV;
}

my $cwd = &POSIX::getcwd;

foreach (@ARGV) {
    if(/^\+\d+$/) {
	print EMACS "$_ ";
    } elsif(/^\//) {
	print EMACS &quote_file_name($_), ' ';
    } else {
	print EMACS &quote_file_name("$cwd/$_"), ' ';
    }
}

printf STDERR "Waiting for Emacs...";
select(STDERR); $| = 1;

print EMACS "\n";
select(EMACS); $| = 1;

while(<EMACS>) {
    printf STDERR $_;
}

exit 0;

######################################################################## 

sub quote_file_name {
    my ($filename) = @_;

    $filename =~ s/\&/\&\&/g;
    $filename =~ s/^-/\&-/g;
    $filename =~ s/ /\&_/g;

    return $filename;
}
</pre>


----
CategoryExternalUtilities