694      iPhone_iPad_Mac_apple

How to change default terminal editor

It should be possible to change the default terminal editor by setting an environment variable in .bash_profile.

I have tried various permutations of, for instance:

export EDITOR=/Applications/TextWrangler.app

including:

export EDITOR=/Applications/TextWrangler.app/Contents/MacOS/TextWrangler

and TextEdit tenaciously holds on as the default editor.

"prinetenv" even displays the default at:

EDITOR=/Applications/TextWrangler.app

Yet, Textedit remains the default editor.

Can anyone help me figure this out.  Apple must set the default editor sin some oddball way.

Thanks,

--Kenoli

The default editor would need to be a unix editor that's compatible with running in the terminal.  To run a gui app from the terminal, you use the open command.

TextWrangler has an optional install for terminal commands.  Do the install.  Use the textwrangler command in your edit line.

R

I have installed the command line tools for TextWrangler.

As far as I can tell

open -t

in the terminal should open the default editor.  Instead it opens TextEdit.

Also, I believe:

export EDITOR=/Applications/TextWrangler.app

or

export EDITOR=/Applications/TextWrangler.app/Contents/MacOS/TextWrangler

should set the default editor to TextWrangler.

open -a /Applications/TextWrangler.app

causes the terminal to open TextWrangler.

The reason this is important here is that I am trying to set TextWrangler as default editor in GIT because there is something in TextEdit that causes characters to read incorrectly in the terminal.

--Kenoli

This worked for me:

1) install textwrangle command line tools.

    https://www.barebones.com/support/textwrangler/cmd-line-tools.html

    https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/9587/how-can-i-open-a-text-file-with-te xtwrangler-from-the-terminal-command-line

2)

mac $ echo  $EDITOR
/usr/bin/nano
mac $ export EDITOR=edit
mac $ echo  $EDITOR
edit