Manual: sensible-editor

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.  Programs 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 system, with a
       series of hard-coded command names as fallbacks.

       Variables will be skipped if unset or null, but may  include  extra  whitespace-separated  parameters
       such  as	 a  --verbose flag.  Once sensible-editor 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 because 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 designed to make it easy for  indi‐
       vidual 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.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/

Debian						 28 Aug 2022				  SENSIBLE-EDITOR(1)