Default crontab editor
Posted on November 26, 2005
I was working on some sysadmin tasks on a freshly installed server, and I found out the crontab editor was not what I expected it to be. I really like vi (or vim) for command line editing, so I wanted ‘crontab -e’ to use vi instead of something else. To make that happen, I put this into my bashrc file (location: ~/.bashrc):
export VISUAL=vi
I keep forgetting this, so I decided to blog it. Don’t forget to reload the bashrc by doing this:
source ~/.bashrc
And vi will be at your service!
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Thank you, vi has been bugging me for a while. Just changed to nano!
Thanks for the tip, although I also much prefer nano as my default editor.
Thank you very much!

vim at last
So much faster to edit stuff
Thanks man. One of those things that you think would be easy to edit in a configuration file. I, too, prefer the vi editor, not nano.
Loved nano for awhile, until I realized the true power of vi
thanks! this helped me also…