SENSIBLE-EDITOR(1) General Commands Manual SENSIBLE-EDITOR(1)
NAME
sensible-editor - launch sensibly chosen text editor
SYNOPSIS
sensible-editor [OPTIONS...]
DESCRIPTION
sensible-editor makes sensible decisions on which editor to call. Pro-
grams in Debian can invoke this script to get a good default editor.
sensible-editor looks for an appropriate choice of editor in a series of
places, and uses the first candidate that works. It starts by checking
environment variables, followed by a variable defined via select-editor,
then tries the default editor command defined by the alternatives sys-
tem, with a series of hard-coded command names as fallbacks.
Variables will be skipped if unset or null, but may include extra white-
space-separated parameters such as a --verbose flag. Once sensible-edi-
tor has a candidate commandline, it will try to run it (passing on the
arguments it was given as the files to be edited). If this fails be-
cause the command couldn't be executed (exit code 126) or was not found
(exit code 127), it tries the next candidate.
The specific candidates sensible-editor tries, in order, are:
• $VISUAL – see environ(7)
• $EDITOR – see environ(7)
• $SENSIBLE_EDITOR
• $SELECTED_EDITOR – see select-editor(1)
• editor – see editor(1), update-alternatives(1)
• nano(1)
• nano-tiny(1)
• vi(1)
If all of these fail, sensible-editor errors out. This system is de-
signed to make it easy for individual users to set a personal and/or
temporary default, overriding the system-wide defaults.
SEE ALSO
sensible-browser(1), sensible-pager(1), select-editor(1), environ(7),
editor(1), update-alternatives(1)
CONFORMING TO
The behavior of sensible-utils under a Debian system is documented in
section 11.4 of Debian-Policy, available under /usr/share/doc/debian-
policy if debian-policy is installed, or online at https://www.de-
bian.org/doc/debian-policy/
Debian 28 Aug 2022 SENSIBLE-EDITOR(1)
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