Specifying Vim or Nano as Default Editor for Crontab File

One of the most common activities when managing cron jobs is editing the crontab file. By default, the system specifies the editor for you. But, what if you’d rather use your favourite text editor such as Nano or Vim? In this article, we’ll show you how to specify either Nano or Vim as your crontab editor.

What You Need to Know

This process involves setting an environment variable called VISUAL. It is a standard Unix environment variable that determines which editor is invoked when a program wants to start a text editor. Here, we’ll set it to either Nano or Vim before running the crontab -e command.

It’s important to note that in order to use Nano or Vim, they must be installed on your system. Most Unix-like systems come with both pre-installed.

Setting Nano as the Crontab Editor

To specify Nano as the crontab editor, you will need to run the following command:

export VISUAL=nano; crontab -e

After running this command, Nano will be used as the text editor for your current crontab session.

Setting Vim as the Crontab Editor

If you’d rather use Vim, the process is quite similar. Run the following command:

export VISUAL=vim; crontab -e

Once this command is run, Vim will be used as the text editor for your current crontab session.

Making Vim or Nano the Permanent Crontab Editor

If you’d like to make Vim or Nano your default crontab editor across all sessions, you can add the export line to your shell profile file.

For bash users, add the following line to your .bashrc or .bash_profile file:

For Nano:

echo 'export VISUAL=nano' >> ~/.bashrc

For Vim:

echo 'export VISUAL=vim' >> ~/.bashrc

Then, source the file to apply the changes:

source ~/.bashrc

Now, every time you invoke crontab -e, it will automatically open in the specified editor.

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