The FreeBSD Diary

Providing practical examples since 1998

changing your default editor 4 March 1999

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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.

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