Running a program from elisp that runs `emacsclient` set on `$EDITOR`

Question

I'm automating some work tasks, and many of them consist of calling kubectl edit on different objects.

kubectl edit basically opens your $EDITOR which I have configured to be emacsclient.

My question is, how can I, from elisp run a command like kubectl edit that consists on a blocking call (waits for completion) to emacsclient, have all the edits I need done with emacsclient and then continue the execution of the elisp function?

Or maybe, instead of using $EDITOR to emacsclient can I set $EDITOR to something like: "the current running Emacs instance"?

I've found this answer that seem to be similar to my problem. But I wanted to know if there's a way for Emacs to understand that a command is calling $EDITOR and use the current instance, instead of doing it through emacsclient.

Answer 1

You're looking for the with-editor library (which is what @Lindydancer is alluding to in the comment about Magit).

https://elpa.nongnu.org/nongnu/with-editor.html

It provides the commands with-editor-async-shell-command and with-editor-shell-command, which are intended as replacements for async-shell-command and shell-command. They automatically export $EDITOR making sure the executed command uses the current Emacs instance as "the editor".

Example:

(defun my-crontab-edit ()
  "Edit crontab."
  (interactive)
  (require 'with-editor)
  (with-editor-async-shell-command "crontab -e"))