Cannot edit crontab for the first time

[deadb0d4]

Summary

Cannot edit crontab for the first time

Reproduction Steps

I tried this:

• EDITOR=$(which hx) in my .zshrc on my macbook.
• Then, I did crontab -e for the first time on this machine.
• Once I added a new crontab job, I did :wq.

I expected this to happen: I would be able to correctly save the crontab file.

Instead, this happened: crontab complains that saving the file wasn't in place or something like that.

Helix log

~/.cache/helix/helix.log

please provide a copy of `~/.cache/helix/helix.log` here if possible, you may need to redact some of the lines

Platform

macOS

Terminal Emulator

iterm2

Installation Method

brew

Helix Version

helix 25.01.1 (e7ac2fcd)

[camerondugan]

I can't reproduce locally, are you able to provide the error? You also say first time, does this mean the second time it worked?

[deadb0d4]

@camerondugan thanks for replying back,

are you able to provide the error?

❯ crontab -e
crontab: no crontab for ... - using an empty one
crontab: temp file must be edited in place

This would work if EDITOR was set to vim for example.

does this mean the second time it worked?

I've just checked that I get the error above every time. Sorry for the confusion.

Lmk if I can provide more info, I use default helix from homebrew, and the default, system-wide crontab.

[jedahan]

If helix edits a file by making a temporary file, and then copying it over, crontab will error. To edit crontab, the inode needs to be the same. Is there a way to tell helix to edit in place?

[RivenSkaye]

This problem reproduces in vim if you turn off the backupcopy option which copies the file for editing, and then overwrites the old file on save. As far as I can tell, Helix doesn't offer equivalent functionality for that yet

[halcyon]

I'm having an issue in FreeBSD that is likely being caused by the same underlying problem.

± % crontab -e
crontab: temp file must be edited in place

[ambv]

This would be solved by PR #13656.

[notnmeyer]

@ambv not really. #13656 adds a config option but there's not a cli flag for it, so you'd have to have run crontab with EDITOR set a wrapper script or something. imo its still easier to just use a different editor for it.

maybe somebody can come up with something cleaner, but this is where my brain went if you were deadset on using helix with crontab,

➜ cat /tmp/hx.config
[editor]
atomic-save = false

➜ cat ~/bin/hx-cron
#!/usr/bin/env bash
exec hx -c /tmp/hx.config "$@"

➜ crontab -r
➜ EDITOR=hx-cron crontab -e
crontab: no crontab for nate - using an empty one
crontab: installing new crontab

[forivall]

I can think of 3 possible solutions:

1. allow commands to be run via cli flags: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/10021, use :set editor.atomic-save false
2. (simpler version of (1)) allow configuration flags to be set at the command line, use --config-set editor.atomic-save false
3. allow configuration overrides in languages.toml, configure the file pattern for the crontab file, and set the editor.atomic-save option there. (i couldnt determine from the docs if this is currently possible)

[deniscormier]

After learning about crontab and wanting to edit it in Helix, this thread pointed at atomic-save = false. Brilliant!

After some experimentation, I assume the remaining issue is how to automate setting atomic-save = false for crontab files only... The best solution I came up with is a macro in config.toml:

# Type +a in normal mode to toggle atomic-save (true -> false)
[keys.normal."+"]
a = ":toggle atomic-save"

Also note that on Mac (at least), crontab -e creates a temp file like /tmp/crontab.zB0JOzjR7F for cron modifications. I don't know if that poses an additional hurdle for a languages.toml-oriented solution.