system wide default editor

[Jay Daniels]

On Wed, 2009-09-02 at 23:38 +0200, Siggy Brentrup wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 02, 2009 at 17:19 -0400, Jay Daniels wrote:
> > When I create a cron job with crontab -e, a pico looking ( nano whatever
> > name ) pops up as my editor.
> > 
> > How do I change the default editor in Ubuntu Hardy to vi or emacs -nw.
> 
> % sudo update-alternatives --config editor
> 
> I choose jed as a small emacs lookalike that supports utf-8.
> 
> > Why in the world would anyone want to use this 1st grade dos looking
> > text editor if they installed Linux?
> 
> Don't ask me for Debian's bogus defaults, there are more than this
> one.
> 
> HTH
>   Siggy


One more problem, I am running emacs-snapshot  So how do I get emacs -nw
as default.

emacs is linked to /etc/alternatives/emacs which is linked
to /usr/bin/emacs-snapshot

I can rm the emacs in /usr/bin/emacs and replace it with 

#!/bin/sh
emacs -nw

But how to make it show up in

sudo update-alternatives --config editor

Perhaps I should just add this to .bashrc?
alias emacs='emacs -nw'
export EDITOR='emacs'

It seems like I remember slackware was smart enough to start up emacs in
proper mode depending on how you ran it.  Don't know how it accomplished
this, emacs startup script maybe?



jay