MacOS Terminal – Built-in Text Editor

macosterminal

Is there a built-in text editor in the terminal on Lion?

(Like, for example, nano on Linux.)

Best Answer

vim, emacs, nano and pico are all available by default with OS X 10.7.4:

/Users/ian
> which nano
/usr/bin/nano

/Users/ian
> which vim
/usr/bin/vim

/Users/ian
> which emacs
/usr/bin/emacs

> which pico
/usr/bin/pico

Related Solutions

How to make a terminal alias that edits root owned files in a GUI text editor

sudo and open provide all the functionality already for editing files of other users so you can just run

SUDO_EDITOR="open -FWne" sudo -e /etc/hosts

to edit /etc/hosts. Make sure to quit Textedit at the end (Cmd-Q) because otherwise sudo won't notice that you're done with editing.

To make life easier add the following to your .bashrc (or .alias if you have it)

alias sudoedit='SUDO_EDITOR="open -FWne" sudo -e'

plist Files – Troubleshooting Opening Issues on macOS

plist files are not necessarily plain text so they need to be run through a converter. Finder and Xcode (which has a plist editor) do this without telling the user

The binary format is documented in this C code so any application can convert it and someone has written a format description in English and more Apple documentation here but note that it references old paths in /Developer/Documentation

The command line program plutil can convert to and from XML

e.g. to view a binary property list in XML format on stdout:

plutil -convert xml1 -o - <file name>

Also to convert a binary to a XML plist in place and then leave it so that the user program can read either.

plutil -convert xml1 <file name>

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to make a terminal alias that edits root owned files in a GUI text editor

plist Files – Troubleshooting Opening Issues on macOS

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