posted by steve | Category: Random Rants, Useful Items That I Forget |

Somehow it appears that the default editor got switched to Nano on the upgrade from Debian Sarge to Etch. At least I think it did. I would certainly remember having to use Nano before and would’ve been sufficiently annoyed to change that.

I messed up a couple crontab entries, expecting to be editing with Vi but instead editing with Nano. Ouch. I caught it but it’s amazing how much habitual hitting ESC to switch between modes in Vi becomes, along with the other keys to come out of command mode within Vi. Those certainly don’t work so well in Nano.

Trying to switch gears mentally from Vi mode to Nano mode after 17 straight hours on the computer is somewhat difficult.

Anyway, /etc/alternatives holds all that fun stuff in Debian and this command will change the setting for the editor:

update-alternatives --config editor


As a side note, I have multiple categories in my blog and this one really fits into both “Random Rants” and “Useful Items That I Forget”.