I recently learned that if I page my files with less, I can press v and open the buffer in Emacs. This works as long as I have the environment variable $EDITOR set up correctly, which in my case I have it as:

export EDITOR='env TERM=xterm-256color emacs -nw'

The above gives me the ability to load emacs within the terminal that runs less.

However, the trick above does not work when piping commands to less. When doing this, less complains with the following message:

Cannot edit standard input (press RETURN)

My question is, why does this happen? But perhaps most importantly, is there any workaround to it?

I recently learned that if I page my files with less, I can press v and open the buffer in Emacs. This works as long as I have the environment variable $EDITOR set up correctly, which in my case I have it as:

export EDITOR='env TERM=xterm-256color emacs -nw'

The above gives me the ability to load emacs within the terminal that runs less.

However, the trick above does not work when piping commands to less. When doing this, less complains with the following message:

Cannot edit standard input (press RETURN)

My question is, why does this happen? But most importantly, is there any workaround to it?

I recently learned that if I page my files with less, I can press v and open the buffer in Emacs. This works as long as I have the environment variable $EDITOR set up correctly, which in my case I have it as:

export EDITOR='env TERM=xterm-256color emacs -nw'

The above gives me the ability to load emacs within the terminal that runs less.

However, the trick above does not work when piping commands to less. When doing this, less complains with the following message:

Cannot edit standard input (press RETURN)

My question is, why does this happen? But perhaps most importantly, is there any workaround to it?

I recently learned that if I page my files with less, I can press v and open the buffer in Emacs. This works as long as I have the environment variable $EDITOR set up correctly, which in my case I have it as:

export EDITOR='env TERM=xterm-256color emacs -nw'

The above gives me the ability to load emacs within the terminal that runs less.

However, the trick above does not work when piping commands to less. When doing this, less complains with the following message:

Cannot edit standard input (press RETURN)

My question is, why does this happen? But perhaps most importantly, is there any workaround to it?