call up an EDITOR (vim) from a python script

Question

I want to call up an editor in a python script to solicit input from the user, much like crontab e or git commit does.

Here\'s a snippet fr

Answer 1

click is a great library for command line processing and it has some utilities, click.edit() is portable and uses the EDITOR environment variable. I typed the line, stuff, into the editor. Notice it is returned as a string. Nice.

(venv) /tmp/editor $ export EDITOR='=mvim -f'
(venv) /tmp/editor $ python
>>> import click
>>> click.edit()
'stuff\n'

Check out the docs https://click.palletsprojects.com/en/7.x/utils/#launching-editors My entire experience:

/tmp $ mkdir editor
/tmp $ cd editor
/tmp/editor $ python3 -m venv venv
/tmp/editor $ source venv/bin/activate
(venv) /tmp/editor $ pip install click
Collecting click
  Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/fa/37/45185cb5abbc30d7257104c434fe0b07e5a195a6847506c074527aa599ec/Click-7.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Installing collected packages: click
Successfully installed click-7.0
You are using pip version 19.0.3, however version 19.3.1 is available.
You should consider upgrading via the 'pip install --upgrade pip' command.
(venv) /tmp/editor $ export EDITOR='=mvim -f'
(venv) /tmp/editor $ python
Python 3.7.3 (v3.7.3:ef4ec6ed12, Mar 25 2019, 16:52:21)
[Clang 6.0 (clang-600.0.57)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import click
>>> click.edit()
'stuff\n'
>>>