Feature Request / Question: Open the current post in an external editor

[NikolaM-Dev]

What I'm Trying to Do

I'm using bulletty and would like to edit the content of the currently‑selected article with my favorite text editor (e.g., neovim, emacs, vim).

What I've Tried

• Scanning the README and key‑binding help screens. I can't find any command that launches an editor.
• Looking through the source code for an "open‑editor" or similar function.

My Question

• Is there an existing key‑binding or command that opens the selected post in an external editor?
• If not, could a feature be added (e.g., e) that spawns $EDITOR (or a configurable editor) with the article's content in the reader-screen?

Why This Would Be Useful

• Makes quick edits or annotations possible without leaving the TUI.
• Aligns with typical RSS‑reader workflows where users want to tidy up notes or add comments.
• We can script over the editor layer, e.g. Neovim Commands + My Second Brain in another tab + Agent Split to apply custom prompts to get transcriptions, summary, key points...

[crocidb]

Hi @NikolaM-Dev,

That's an interesting feature I never thought about. We do have highlights and notes planned for bulletty, as that's something I'm really interested in getting implemented, especially with some robust note system where you could also just browse your notes and highlights independently of article.

But honestly I don't think one feature competes with each other, being able to open the articles with your favorite reader is actually a big part of having an open filesystem library. I wouldn't know how to that, though. Should the program pause itself and open the editor as a foreground process? How would that work in other systems like Windows? Maybe it could just offer the key-binding, as you suggest, and the user can customize the way they want, like opening a new tmux pane with the editor pointing to the file?

I'm very open for a broader discussion in this matter! I'm reopening the issue so more people can also chime in, if anyone else have opinions.

Thanks!

[NikolaM-Dev]

Hi @crocidb, first I must apologize for not reading the CONTRIBUTING.md and creating an issue when it was clear that I should have used a discussion instead...

Right now, I have something working but not the "open in editor" feature. I tried to implement the feature myself (I only learned something about Rust just for this project) and ran into a lot of weird bugs that I didn't know how to debug. And I didn't even consider supporting another OS besides Linux (I use Arch, BTW), so I discarded the idea. So I came up with the same idea, just use tmux and open a new window in the current session with the file in a temporary file in markdown and the metadata in a YAML frontmatter.

I solved the export problem because the entry.text is not pure markdown, it's a mixture of AsciiDoc and markdown. So I convert the AsciiDoc subheadings to markdown subheadings (##).

That works well, but I think the ultimate solution would be to enable a custom way of opening posts, using a custom command that could be defined in a configuration file.

Demo

This is my current solution in action:

2026-02-21_20-16-34.mov

Extras

I also added this autocmd in my Neovim config to quickly quit

-- autocmds.lua
vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd('BufEnter', {
	desc = 'Quit edit for bulletty_entry buffers',
	group = vim.api.nvim_create_augroup('nikola_quit_bulletty_entry', { clear = true })),
	pattern = 'bulletty_entry_*',
	callback = function(args)
		nkl.key.bmap('n', 'q', ':q!<cr>', { buffer = args.buf, desc = ' quit rss reader buffer' })
	end,
})

-- lib.lua
-- The `bmap` implementation, just use `vim.keymap.set` with the next options
function M.bmap(mode, lhs, rhs, opts)
	opts = vim.tbl_extend('force', {
		buffer = true,
		nowait = true,
		silent = true,
	}, opts or {})

	vim.keymap.set(mode, lhs, rhs, opts)
end