EDITOR

Preferred default editor for CLI tools.

Ubuntu Debian Arch Fedora CentOS SUSE Alpine macOS FreeBSD

Verified: 2026-05-12

Syntax

$echo $EDITOR

Examples

$export EDITOR=vim

$git config --global core.editor "$EDITOR"

Typical use cases

Standard usage

EDITOR --help

Note Used by git, crontab, visudo, and many other tools.

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