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 se-
lect-editor, then tries the default editor command defined by the al-
ternatives system, with a series of hard-coded command names as fall-
backs.
Variables will be skipped if unset or null, but may include extra
whitespace-separated parameters such as a --verbose flag. Once sensi-
ble-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
• nano-tiny
• vi
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.
BUGS
This command takes precautions against launching itself in an infinite
loop if a user sets EDITOR=sensible-editor but indirect loops are still
possible.
SEE ALSO
sensible-browser(1), sensible-pager(1), select-editor(1), environ(7),
editor(1), update-alternatives(1)
CONFORMS 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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