External editor?

Desktop
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First: desktop is great. It’s better than anything else I’ve tried for runbooks, and it scratches an itch I’ve had for a while (which is why I’ve been trying other tools).

Second, a gripe: the experience of editing is not great for me. I have vim in my fingers, and am not keen to learn a new set of keystrokes and shortcuts.

Finally, a question / request: is there a plan to allow external editing of files?

I think you are doing fancy, crdt-backed documents – a neato feature, for sure. But I’d be happiest with my runbooks in git.

I see there’s an ‘import runbook’ feature, so this gives me hope!

Thanks for a very cool tool!

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Love to hear this, thank you! What kind of thing are you using it for?

Very far off, to be totally honest with you. Our data model is rich enough that you’d be editing a JSON file, which would be a pretty terrible experience. There’s a future where we support <some custom format> that’s both human readable/writable, but it’s unlikely to be soon. We will probably get vim binding support sooner!

We will reasonably soon support import/export, of the following

  1. Full rich data (json blob)
  2. Lossy markdown (we cannot encode all the data we work with into standard markdown)
  3. A combination of the above

What attracts you most to git? Versioning/backup/etc?

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For me, I’d like to create a github action, even if external editor is not on the horizon soon.

My specific use case is something like GitHub - skupperproject/skewer: A library for documenting and testing Skupper examples (performing cli actions in multiple kube contexts).

ATM I can copy blocks from one runbook to another, but i have no way to insert new material (other than hacking the db).

A good first step would be to allow copy/paste json to/from clipboard

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What kind of thing are you using it for?

So far: runbooks to automate tedious, terminal-centered tasks:

  • collect configuration
  • run a series of long-running python scripts
  • call some APIs
  • copy files to a bucket
  • etc.

What attracts you most to git? Versioning/backup/etc?

I work a lot in the terminal, which is how I started using atuin (pre-desktop) in the first place. So naturally, I want to stay in the terminal to edit files, share them with colleagues, etc. Especially as runbooks evolve with the software, how great to version runbooks along with the software?

Anyway, @ellie, thanks for the response! I appreciate how active you are here and on discord, and I think what you’re building is very cool.