Setting permanent export EDITOR to nano for all future sessions

Question

Every time I SSH into my AWS, I am changing editor to nano. Is there a command to run that will change it to nano for all future instances a well?

@DavidFoerster Certainly looks like a dupe but the accepted answer in the question you have linked is pretty bad: a simple link to a pretty messy Ubuntu wiki page? — andrew.46, May 16 '17 at 22:53
@andrew.46: Look at the next answer with more than the quadruple amount of votes then. :-) — David Foerster, May 17 '17 at 08:13

score 13 · Answer 1 · answered May 16 '17 at 07:47

A couple of easy steps should see you through:

Log into your account using ssh
Open the file ~/.bashrcwith a text editor
Add something like the following:
```
export EDITOR='/usr/bin/nano'
```
Save the file (and adjust the path to nano if you have it in a non-standard location)
Either log out and back in again or simply type:
```
source ~/.bashrc
```

And then you should be set :).

References:

How to set the default text editor in Linux

score 8 · Answer 2 · answered May 16 '17 at 07:34

To set the default editor using the update-alternatives command. Open up a terminal window and type in the following command:

sudo update-alternatives --config editor

Here’s an example of what you’ll see:

$ sudo update-alternatives –config editor

There are 5 alternatives which provide `editor’.

Selection Alternative
———————————————–
1 /usr/bin/vim
2 /bin/ed
*+ 3 /bin/nano
4 /usr/bin/vim.basic
5 /usr/bin/vim.tiny
Press enter to keep the default[*], or type selection number:

You can select the editor you want by just typing in the number. For example, if I want to change the default editor to vim, I would just hit the number 1.

Setting permanent export EDITOR to nano for all future sessions

2 Answers2