( By the way, I am anonymous above - philosophize on that as you will :-)
You are right - my proposed `.edit` command does not answer your feature request exactly. So I would ammend my syntax proposal to the following:
.edit [--table|-t NAME] [FILENAME]
Where `--table NAME` dumps the matching begin/table-or-view+triggers/commit definitions (into FILENAME if given or a tmpfile otherwise) to be externally $EDITOR'd and `.read`. Now that I have described it I can say I would have used this about 50 times today already if it existed.
p.s. There is also a similar `\ef` in `psql` for editing function definitions