How can I properly set sudo/visudo's editor?

handyman_hank

I am using Ubuntu 10.04 Server and trying to set up sudoers to respect a user's EDITOR choice (within limits) In my sudoers I have: Defaults editor=/usr/bin/nano:/usr/bin/vim Defaults env_reset And in the user .bashrc: export EDITOR=/usr/bin/vim $EDITOR is set: $ echo $EDITOR /usr/bin/vim According to man sudoers this should be enough for $EDITOR to be set to vim: editor A colon (':') separated list of editors allowed to be used with visudo....

Originally asked by Mark C on Stack Exchange (superuser) (CC BY-SA 3.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

You are right that setting the EDITOR variable should change the editor used for sudo . However, there are two other variables with precedence over the EDITOR : SUDO_EDITOR and VISUAL . Make sure none of them point to some other editor like nano .

Full answer by Guy: https://superuser.stackexchange.com/a/573851 (CC BY-SA 3.0).

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