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 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.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/

Debian							 28 Aug 2022					  SENSIBLE-EDITOR(1)