I have vim as default editor on my Mac and every time I run commands on Mac terminal, it automatically opens "vim".
How can I set up "nano" instead and make sure the terminal will open "nano" every time is needed?
How to set the default editor as nano on the Mac
macintoshnanoosxterminalvim
Related Solutions
You should add it to your shell’s configuration file. For Bash, this is ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile. You should also set $VISUAL, as some programs (correctly) use that instead of $EDITOR (see VISUAL vs. EDITOR). Additionally, unless you know why, you should set it to vim instead of vi.
TL;DR, add the following to your shell configuration (probably ~/.bashrc):
export VISUAL=vim
export EDITOR="$VISUAL"
This link provides the details on how to do this, titled: [Change File Associations in Mac OS X]]1.
excerpt of details from that link
Note this will impact all of a certain file format type, meaning changing this for one PDF will impact all PDF’s, and so on.
- Find the file type(s) that you want to change the application to open with
- Get Info about a file that is of that file type, say a .mov
- Click the ‘Open With’ arrow to expand an application list
- Choose the application you want all files of this type to open with (in this example we’ll use VLC to open all .mov files)
- Click “Change All” and then “Continue” when the confirmation dialog appears
NOTE: Now all of the files of that type will open in the application you specified. You can do this with any file type to keep things consistent.
Best Answer
Set the
EDITORandVISUALenvironment variables tonano.If you use
bashon macOS, this is easiest done by editing your~/.bash_profilefile and adding the two linesto the bottom of the file. If the file does not exist, you may create it.
You should set both variables as some tools use one and others may use the other.
You will need to restart your terminal to have the changes take effect.