How to launch an EDITOR (e. g. 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 from what I have running so far. (In the future, I might use $EDITOR instead of vim so that folks can customize to their liking.)

tmp_file = '/tmp/up.'+''.join(random.choice(string.ascii_uppercase + string.digits) for x in range(6)) edit_call = [ "vim",tmp_file] edit = subprocess.Popen(edit_call,stdin=subprocess.PIPE, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True )    

My problem is that by using Popen, it seems to keep my i/o with the python script from going into the running copy of vim, and I can't find a way to just pass the i/o through to vim. I get the following error.

Vim: Warning: Output is not to a terminal Vim: Warning: Input is not from a terminal 

What's the best way to call a CLI program from python, hand control over to it, and then pass it back once you're finished with it?

Answer 1

Calling up $EDITOR is easy. I've written this kind of code to call up editor:

import sys, tempfile, os from subprocess import call  EDITOR = os.environ.get('EDITOR','vim') #that easy!  initial_message = "" # if you want to set up the file somehow  with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(suffix=".tmp") as tf:   tf.write(initial_message)   tf.flush()   call([EDITOR, tf.name])    # do the parsing with `tf` using regular File operations.   # for instance:   tf.seek(0)   edited_message = tf.read() 

The good thing here is, the libraries handle creating and removing the temporary file.