[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #44720] edit.m: Fails to open protected file if ~/octave does not exist

[Mike Miller]

Follow-up Comment #3, bug #44720 (project octave):

The HOME that edit.m talks about is not the same as the $HOME environment
variable.

This is an old feature of edit.m that differs from Matlab I think, and
probably isn't used much these days. The intent, I think, was to allow you to
edit an m-file even if you don't have write permission. If the file is not
writable, e.g. part of Octave's system path, it would copy it to your writable
HOME directory, which is also supposed to be in your load path, and that copy
would then override the one in the system path.

If you set the EDITINPLACE variable to true, it will open the non-writeable
file in your editor anyway without making a copy.

I asked about some bugs in edit.m when I first started working with Octave and
got the impression that a lot of these features are legacy and could probably
be deprecated. E.g. we might make EDITINPLACE true by default, deprecate it,
and remove it at some point.

IMHO these are more sensible defaults:


>> edit editinplace true
>> edit home .



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