changing your default editor
When I was upgrading to 3.1, I was told about mergemaster, which helps you reconcile/merge your old
/etc with the new /etc. However, with my upgrade came the vi
editor, and not the ee which I knew and loved. Here’s how I changed it so
that mergemaster used ee.
This setting will also affect the vipw
and chsh commands, which is a Good Thing (TM).
Please note that I’m using the bash shell. And I’ve been told this will work for
all Bourne derived shells (e.g. sh, bash, ksh).
# export EDITOR=/usr/bin/ee # echo $EDITOR /usr/bin/ee
For csh derived shells, I’m told that you use this command:
# setenv EDITOR /usr/bin/ee
You may also want to know about changing your shell.
Just to add,
To set your favourite editor as the default for every login, you might want to do the following:
1) Go to the user’s homedir (eg. /home/keith)
2) Edit the shell dotfile (.bash_login for bash, .cshrc for csh) to have the following values, usually:
export EDITOR=pico (for bash) or
setenv EDITOR pico (for csh)
note that you might want to specify the fullpath, eg
export EDITOR=/usr/local/bin/pico
3) Save the file and relogin.
4) Test by typing "crontab -e", Voila! It should bring up your favourite editor.