Providing 'default' value with raw_input()?

[Ernst Noch]

Alex Martelli wrote:

> In some situations it may be impractical to rely on the editor closing;
> for example, the user's favorite editor might be a multitab one that's
> big, heavy, and slow to start, so that the user doesn't close the whole
> process but rather just a specific tab.  In such cases, unless you can
> build in some hook specific to the user's favorite editor (so you can
> know when a specific tab/file is done getting edited), you may end up
> requiring the user to press enter at your prompt to indicate he or she's
> done editing, or some such semi-kludge.  I cannot think of a
> sufficiently general solution, given the variety of editors around, to
> just magically divine the crucial "done with editing" condition...
> 
> 
> Alex

The ExternalEditor product for Zope does this in a quite clever way - 
probably not perfect, but it worked for me every time in windows and linux.
The product is used to be able to edit any Zope object in an external 
editor and automatically transfer the edited file from the client to the 
server after save.

The source can be found at http://plope.com/software/ExternalEditor.