Debian – How to change the default text editor in the Debian (squeeze) distro

debianeditorsenvironment-variables

"Joe's own editor" does not come naturally to me. How do I change to using nano or vim?

I've tried

export EDITOR=nano

but it doesn't seem to be respected. I'd like visudo to respect this as well.

Best Answer

To change the default editor at the system level:

sudo update-alternatives --config editor

and then follow the onscreen prompts.

Related Solutions

Bash – What is the ‘editor’ Command?

This is a Debian-ism (and therefore appears in Ubuntu, Mint, etc.). They've setup a link called editor. You can trace it back as follows:

$ which editor
/usr/bin/editor

$ ls -l /usr/bin/editor 
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 Nov 24 19:10 /usr/bin/editor -> /etc/alternatives/editor

$ ls -l /etc/alternatives/editor
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 Nov 24 19:46 /etc/alternatives/editor -> /usr/bin/vim.gnome

$ ls -l /usr/bin/vim.gnome
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2403392 Oct 26  2012 /usr/bin/vim.gnome

So you can see that editor is just a Unix link to the executable vim.gnome.

Using `editor`?

I don't think I'd go in that direction of setting up editor in any meaningful way for users, given it's not what I would consider standard.

Additionally you can set the $EDITOR environment variable to point to anything you want, vim, gedit, emacs, etc. But this variable is only guaranteed to be used by other tools such as sudo, git, and subversion that are specifically designed to be tied into using the variable $EDITOR.

Implementation ideas

I would merely setup an alias of your own choice and either instruct the users that it's available to them via their $HOME/.bashrc file as alias X, or set it up as a system configuration in the file /etc/profile.d/our_aliases.sh, as alias X.

Or you could just tell users that the systems' provide gedit, gvim, vim, emacs, etc. and cut through the sugar coating and teach them about these things right off the bat.

Or you could provide a text file called /etc/help.txt which they could run via a command help (alias help="less /etc/help.txt") in a shell that would provide basic commands and how to perform various tasks. This approach allows you to customize the help as time goes by with new features or tips and it gives them more than just the editor convenience command.

Set Environment Variable for Ranger File Manager

I use ranger too, and vim.

Try env EDITOR=vim ranger then try out E option to open an editor for the file. If it worked, then the changes are not working for you for either of the two reasons.

You forgot to source .bashrc after editing it with export EDITOR=vim change.
You might be using another shell

For scenario one, just do a source ~/.bashrc before starting ranger or open another shell. For later you want to find out the shell that you are using and edit the proper environment file for it.