Replacing vi with nano - permanently

[viking60]

Many people prefer to have nano as the default terminal editor. On most cases we simply specify nano as the editor so it does not matter.
But when working with cron jobs you will be put into the vi - environment if you do a simple:

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crontab -e

To make sure it opens with nano you can simply put this in your ~/.bashrc

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export EDITOR=nano

Reboot or type:

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source .bashrc

and type crontab -e again; this time it will be opened in nano.

[jkerr82508]

I always add it to /root/.bashrc as well as ~/.bashrc since I have some cron jobs that need to run as root. Doing so also means that visudo uses nano, rather than vi.

I also always add to both:

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export VISUAL=nano

To be quite honest, I've forgotten why I do the latter.

Jim

[viking60]

Good tip there Jim.
It might well come in handy to do a cronjob to backup /etc and then you need to be root.
So yes a:

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su
password
nano .bashrc

and putting

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export EDITOR=nano


in there, makes a lot of sense.

Regarding

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export VISUAL=nano

I have seen people refer to it and use it - but I cannot see why either

Even visudo will open in nano after vi have fixed the root .bashrc afaict

[jemadux]

i dont like vi ..but i prefer vim ..
sometimes i am using nano for specifics files ..
on my archlinux machine I have removed vi and i made a syblick to vim

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ln -s /bin/vim /bin/vi