Re: [RFC] improve nano's interface toward external tools

[Benno Schulenberg]

Op 02-01-2021 om 23:17 schreef Marco Diego Aurélio Mesquita:
> I'd like nano interaction with external tools to be more powerful. The
> external tools plugins for gedit allows some interesting features like
> enabling different behavior for different file types, interface
> directly with git, using zenity to get user input, preview with
> another tool, make, build, compile, run, etc...

That all sounds like IDE stuff -- Integrated Development Environment.
That is not the target area of nano.

> Considering nano macros and external tools, I thought about how to get
> most of the described features with minimal changes to gnu nano. Part
> of the power of gedit external tools plugin come from the environment
> variables that gedit passes when the external program/script is run. I
> think we can mimic that and gain some very interesting features in
> nano.
> 
> The minimal set of environment variables that can be passed to enable
> these features, that I came up with, were (names are
> self-explanatory):
> 
> DOCUMENT_PATH
> LINE

With LINE you mean the text of the current line?

> LINE_NUMBER
> ROW_NUMBER

How would the row number on the screen of nano's cursor be relevant to
an external program?

> These can be achieved with very small changes to gnu nano source code
> and would enable much more advanced interactions with external tools.
> It would allow me, for example, to (I think):
>   - compile and preview a latex project,
>   - check for compile warnings on cursor's current line,
>   - run make for the current project and launch it on another terminal window,
>   - run git diff on the current file and easily show what was changed
> since last commit,
>   - run git add or checkout on current file,

These are all alien ways of thinking to me.  It would not occur to me
to call 'git diff' from within nano.  Calling a tool from within nano
is meant to insert the output of that tool into the current buffer (or
into a new buffer).  Why would I want to read the output of 'git diff'
into nano?  Maybe only if I were writing a book about git or something.

So the external tools you would make for yourself would all take some
action and show some stuff, and then would return zero characters to
nano, so that nano would say "0 lines read"?

Please provide an example script that would show a 'git diff' of the
current buffer.  (Assume that DOCUMENT_PATH is set to "README".)

>   - etc...

(If you give examples, you should not say "etc", since "et cetera" is
not an example.)

Benno

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