Some initial feedback:

• can you test with gedit and gvim as your editor? I've been taking special care to make sure that continues to work.
• I'd like to avoid picking up the dependency on /dev/ as it's not very portable. Is there a more platform independent way of solving this?
• I'm not yet convinced this should be the default. What do you think about comparing isatty on sys.stdin and sys.stdout and being a little more discriminatory as to when we enable the feature?

Also, style wise, I prefer assignment and a light branch to ternary operators and most extra logic to be split into helper functions.

Also prefer explicit kwargs to **extra. E.g., explicitly pass stdout=... and initialize to sys.stdout I guess?

Tested on MacVim ('mvim') and Sublime Text as they are the only GUI editors I have on OSX, it doesn't work for both cases. The string gets returned immediately.

On /dev/tty - unfortunately such a thing doesn't exist on windows. However one can always run cygwin, and given that it is used in many other tools (selecta comes to mind), I expect it to be pretty much universal for modern distros. From Unix Stackexchange:

/dev/tty works as long as the process has a controlling terminal

We can check if std{out,in,err} are ttys before we enable the feature as well, if you want.

Update: What do you mean by light branch to ternary operators? Ok, I see what you mean.

Update: Even git seems to have trouble with GUI $EDITORs.

unfortunately such a thing doesn't exist on windows.

I think it does, via the special file "CON:". I'll have to test when I'm on windows later today.

The default should be use_tty=None. Then:

if use_tty is None:
    use_tty = sys.stdin.isatty() and not sys.stdout.isatty()

Add a helper function to get the tty filename:

def get_tty_filename():
    if sys.platform == 'win32':
        return 'CON:'
    return '/dev/tty'

Which is exactly why the current

👍 Check out the new commits

Pushed to pypi as 1.0