Set your default editor for things like crontab, visudo, etc...

[Rob]

One thing I hate is going in to edit a crontab or run visudo and being forced to use pico instead of my text editor of choice (vim). Here's how to change the default editor for your system..

Open up /etc/bashrc in your favorite editor and look for the lines:

export EDITOR="pico"
export VISUAL="pico"

Now, change it to the one you'd like to use for tools like crontab or visudo:

export EDITOR="vim"
export VISUAL="vim"

You'll have to log out then back in, but now the default editor on your system is of your choosing.

 

[carbon333]

It would be better to modify users ~/.bashrc instead of changing system-wide configuration (and it also would work on a system which you don't have root access to).

 

[Nick Hood]

I'm running a Centos machine and made the suggested change by creating a new file custom.sh in /etc/profile.d containing the two lines:

export EDITOR="nano"
export VISUAL="nano"

(I can't stand vim).