Editor CLI

A simple editor package for Golang CLIs. Similar to kubectl patch. Edit content from a remote server, or content locally on disk, and overwrite the results using your favorite editor.

Configuration

This package will respect the $EDITOR environment variable when launched. By default if no env var is found, it will use vim to edit the requested file.

Usage

This repo is meant to be used as a package for other Golang CLI projects.

It has two main functions you can use as a CLI author for editing files:

• Run(originalContent []byte, originalFilePath string)
  • originalContent is the content of the text to edit in bytes
  • originalFilePath is where the file originated, can be empty if remote. Used to determine the file ext for the tmp file.
• RunLocal(originalFilePath string)
  • originalFilePath is where the file originated, can be empty if remote. Used to determine the file ext for the tmp file.

The example below is a shortened version of main.go using the Run version:

contents, err := client.GetConfig(ctx, ...)
if err != nil { ... }

// Run the editor to let the user edit the contents in a tmp file
edited, _, err := Run(contents, filePathToEdit)
if err != nil {
        fmt.Println("File editing error: ", err)
        os.Exit(1)
}

// Take the locally edited content and send it back
if err := client.SetConfig(ctx, edited); err != nil {
    ...
}

Examples

Use the example CLI to see how this package can work for you:

# Build the CLI with the Makefile in this repo
brian@localghost:editor-cli λ make
# Run the CLI against some examples
brian@localghost:editor-cli λ ./bin/editor-cli --file examples/test.txt