Change default text editor for crontab to vim

I'm using ubuntu 9.10 and the default text editor is nano, which i hate. (doesn't everyone?)

Normally it's not a problem as i just vi or gedit everything but crontab -e is opening with nano. I tried changing it to vim using sudo update-alternatives --config editor and selecting option 3 ("/usr/bin/vim.basic"). This has changed it for sudo and non-sudo alike. But crontab -e still opens nano. Any ideas? max

The crontab -e command will check the environment variables $EDITOR and $VISUAL for an override of the default text editor, so...

export VISUAL=vim

or

export EDITOR=vim

should do the trick.

In ubuntu, try run: select-editor, which interactively creates ~/.selected_editor:

# Generated by /usr/bin/select-editor
SELECTED_EDITOR="/usr/bin/vim.basic"

If you hate nano so much you can just uninstall it:

sudo apt-get remove nano

crontab should then just default to the next EDITOR (for me it was vim.basic).

From man crontab:

The -e option is used to edit the  current  crontab  using  the  editor
specified  by  the  VISUAL  or EDITOR environment variables.  After you
exit from the editor, the modified crontab will be installed  automati‐
cally.  If  neither  of  the environment variables is defined, then the
default editor /usr/bin/editor is used.

Add to your ~/.bashrc:

export EDITOR=vim