Launching An Editor

P4Web lets you launch an external editor to work on files. First, select the file that you want to view in the editor. Then select Edit file from the pulldown menu to launch the editor on that file.

The "edit" option in the interactive resolve program also launches an external editor.

The P4EDITOR configuration setting will be used to determine which editor program to launch. If P4EDITOR was not set in your environment when the p4web executable was started up, a default editor will be launched. You may change P4EDITOR in your environment while running p4web; it will use the updated editor that you have specified. For more information about P4EDITOR, please see the the P4 Command Reference on the Perforce Technical Documentation page.

Note that:

• Only the Windows, Unix, and Macintosh versions of P4Web can launch external editors.

• On Unix, the Edit File feature launches whichever editor P4EDITOR is set to. If you don't have P4EDITOR set to any particular editor, it will launch an Xterm window and run vi. You may also specify Xterm as your P4EDITOR. If you're familiar with X Windows, you can make use of Xterm to edit files on a remote machine. You don't have to be logged onto the machine where the workspace files are as long as you have a p4web executable running on that machine.

  On Windows and Macintosh, P4Web will only launch an external editor if both your browser and the p4web executable are running on the same machine. In other words, you can't use P4Web's Edit File feature to remotely edit files in a workspace on another machine.

• If your P4EDITOR is set to a windowing application, P4Web will launch that application, opening up a new window on your workstation. (On Macintosh this is always the case.)

• If your P4EDITOR is set to a console application, or if it is not set and the default editor is a console application, P4Web behaves as follows:
  • On Windows, a cmd window is opened and the editor application is started in that window.
  • On Unix, an xterm window is opened and the editor application is started in that window.