Microsoft SQL Server: setting your editor in oSQL

This is another oSQL trick. I like to use gvim as my text editor. It reinforces the fact that I am a dinosaur. And it has great regular-expression-based pattern matching.

There was a command to set the editor in SQL*Plus, so I wantetd to be able to do the same in oSQL. The default editor in oSQL is the program "edit. You invoke it from within oSQL by typing "ed".

You set the editor in oSQL by setting the EDITOR command line variable. Here is how I set mine:

set EDITOR=gvim -c "set ft=sql"

This also calls the VIM command to set the syntax to SQL, which gives you pretty color-coding and such.

This tip could be adapted to UltraEdit and similar.