Comments on: Howto Change Default editor in Debian Etch

By: arash

arash — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 19:29:20 +0000

You need to export VISUAL to set the editor for user, not EDITOR.
export VISUAL=vim works

By: GGBce

GGBce — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 01:56:02 +0000

Thank you for your help, but I think that I make the same mistak than other people in comment. Changing EDITOR will not solve 100% the problem. Debian based solution (debian, ubuntu, …) use the “alternatives” to create base aliases. If you update the EDITOR, this will update the value for something called the “editor”. If you try to type :>vi myfile.txt and it’s not the VIM Editor… it because you don’t update the vi alias also. You need to do that also:

update-alternatives --config vi

Every “alternatives” aliases are located in /etc/alternatives. update-alternatives --config editor will solve the problem if you was typing :>editor myfile.txt

Then you need to these commands for full vi support:
update-alternatives --config editor
update-alternatives --config vi
update-alternatives --config view
…

By: Sourav Mohanty

Sourav Mohanty — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 12:45:40 +0000

Thnks for the Solution…

By: krp

krp — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 16:48:13 +0000

I had the same problem I put ” export EDITOR= ” in .bashrc

By: mrG

mrG — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 13:41:04 +0000

The profile advice does not appear to work in either Etch or Ubuntu; I have .bash_profile containing the EDITOR=vim.tiny;export and alias lines as above, I even created a ~/bin/editor symlink! But I still get nano