Open up vim instance to write, then save the text to a variable?

Tooling
1

When I do git commit, Git opens up a little Vim instance. Then I write in it and when I pres :wq, Git saves that text and it becomes the commit message.

Is there any way to have such a workflow within julia? Not related to Git at all, just something to capture user input in a way that gives a bit more flexibility than readline().

2

Can you elaborate more on what you have in mind?

Like, at this point, my suggestion is to use ; vim from the REPL. That is still “within” Julia to some extent, yea?

3

I want to be able to, after a prompt, write multiple lines, then when I close that small editor, julia saves the string of whatever I wrote as a string.

So accessing ; vim would be fine if I could press :wq when I’m done and julia saves that.

4

Something like this maybe?

    path, io = mktemp()
    close(io)
    run(`vim $path`)
    f = read(path, String)
    rm(path)
5

So like a vim REPL mode? That could be interesting maybe

6

Wonderful! This is exactly what I am looking for.

7

You could write something to the file before calling close(io) the user would see it when vim opens the file…but then you would need to remove it from f when you read the contents of the file.