It seems quite common to have a trio of environment variables:
$EDITOR, $VISUAL and $XEDITOR, for line, tty-aware and graphical
editors respectively.

[http://xdvi.sourceforge.net/inverse-search-emacs-noauctex.html]
[http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2006-December/010783.html]

Whether git needs to have a trio of overrides for them is a different
matter, or could just recommend that git be aliased or wrapped if the
editors needed for git are different to normal.

Cheers, Mike

On 8/15/07, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
quoted text
> The usual convention (though _very_ hard to find anywhere explicitly,
> so it might more often than not be ignored) is that $VISUAL points to
> an editor that requires a tty to work on, while $EDITOR might get
> along without one.
>
> So one uses VISUAL in preference of EDITOR on ttys/proper terminals,
> but only EDITOR when without one.  A call from git-gui would probably
> fall in the second category.  A call from tig, in contrast, in the
> first category.
>
> The GIT_EDITOR variable has no way of expressing this difference,
> though.  And I doubt that many people remember this.  I googled around
> but failed to come up with a useful reference (of course, both
> variable names being common words does not exactly help).
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