Editing text with an external editor in Python

[alister]

On Mon, 01 Sep 2014 15:06:04 -0500, Tim Chase wrote:

> On 2014-09-02 04:23, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>> Read $VISUAL, if it exists, otherwise $EDITOR, if it exists, otherwise
>> fall back on something hard coded. Or read it from an ini file. Or
>> create an entry in the register. Whatever. That's up to the application
>> which uses this function, not the function itself.
>> 
>> Under XP and older the standard DOS editor is EDIT, but that's gone
>> from Windows 7. Believe it or not, I understand that you can use:
>> 
>>     copy con [filename.???]
>> 
>> to do basic line editing, which is terrifying, but I believe it works.
> 
> And according to [1], the venerable edlin is still available on Win8,
> even if you don't have edit.  Though according to [2], it sounds like
> MS-EDIT is still available on at least the 32-bit version of Win8 (it
> doesn't detail whether it comes out of the box on 64-bit Win8).
> 
> I don't have Win8, so I can't corroborate either application.
> 
> -tkc
> 
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edlin#History [2]
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS_Editor

if edlin is your only option then it would be better to spend you time 
writhing your own text editor!
Neither edlin or ms-edit are available on my Win 7 installation so I 
doubt that it has been resurrected for win 8



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