🖋 editor - Open a text editor 🖋

editor opens the default text editor or your favorite editor to edit an existing file, a new file, or a tempfile, blocks while the user edits text, then returns the contents of the file.

You can pass a parameter editor= to specify an editor or leave it empty, in which case the editor is:

• The contents of the environment variable VISUAL, if it's set, otherwise:
• The contents of the environment variable EDITOR, if it's set, otherwise:
• The string 'notepad', if the code is running on Windows, otherwise:
• The string 'vim'

Example 1: Using a temporary file

If no filename is provided, a temporary file gets edited, and its contents returned.

import editor

comments = editor.editor(text='Comments here\n\n')
# Pop up the default editor with a tempfile containing "Comments here",
# then return the contents and delete the tempfile.

Example 2: Using a named file

If a filename is provided, then that file gets edited.

import os

FILE = 'file.txt'
assert not os.path.exists(FILE)

comments = editor.editor(text=MESSAGE, filename=FILE)
# Pop up an editor for a new FILE containing MESSAGE, user edits
# This file is saved when the user exits the editor.

assert os.path.exists(FILE)

# You can edit an existing file too, and select your own editor.
comments2 = editor.editor(filename=FILE, editor='emacs -nw')

Command and text handling

An editor command string retains its legacy POSIX shlex parsing. For portable paths and editor arguments, pass an argv sequence instead:

comments = editor.editor(filename=FILE, editor=['emacs', '-nw'])

The edited path is always one final argument, including when it contains spaces or quotes. encoding and errors are optional controls for reading and writing text; omit them to retain the platform-default behavior.

API Documentation

A note on AI use

Version 2.0 has exactly the same API as before, and the great majority of the code is still the handwritten code from before, but I recently used a coding assistant to find a lot of possible errors and edge cases and fix them.

I believe it should do exactly what it did before, but not fail in some unusual but certainly not impossible cases. Please let me know with an issue report if any problems crop up.