Force crontab editor :: default editor

[rick]

Many times you type:

crontab -e

And end up with key bindings your not used to. (h,j,k,i) As in vi or ed.

Say you normally use nano:

export VISUAL=nano; crontab -e

Boom, crontab will open and nano will be your editor.

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Same goes for vi:

export VISUAL=vim; crontab -e

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Then again maybe you want to use your preferred editor always, or as default.

Get a list of available editors currently install on your system by running:

update-alternatives --list editor

In this case, the output is:

/bin/ed
/bin/nano
/usr/bin/vim.gnome
/usr/bin/vim.tiny

So you may combine the above for on demand usage such as:

export VISUAL=ed; crontab -e

Or:

export VISUAL=vim.gnome; crontab -e

ect…

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To make one specific editor default to your users profile, you must edit:

~/.profile

So for example if your enjoying the ease of nano:

nano ~/.profile

And add these lines as follows:

EDITOR=nano
VISUAL=$EDITOR
export EDITOR VISUAL

Replacing in the above case ‘nano’ with your desired default editor.

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When you run the following as root, you are changing the default editor system wide, or all users. In this case, we can use ‘editor’, to see which editors are currently available on the system, as well as priorities, paths, and status:

update-alternatives --config editor

The output will be:

  Selection    Path                Priority   Status
------------------------------------------------------------
* 0            /usr/bin/vim.gnome   60        auto mode
  1            /bin/ed             -100       manual mode
  2            /bin/nano            40        manual mode
  3            /usr/bin/vim.gnome   60        manual mode
  4            /usr/bin/vim.tiny    10        manual mode
Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number: 

Then simply type the number of the default system wide editor you wish.