How To: Change Crontab Editor in macOS

my crontab in nano editor on macOS

macOS uses nano editor for crontab updates lately, which is not the text editor I particularly like.

With this in mind, I decided to change it. Usually it’s enough to just set the EDITOR variable to something like vim

EDITOR=vim crontab -e

or, even better:

export EDITOR=vim
crontab -e

But this no longer does the trick!

Turns out, you need to set VISUAL variable instead:

export VISUAL=vim
crontab -e

… and see how imediately better (and much more familiar to me) the experience looks: my crontab in vim editor on macOS

See Also

• macOS
• macOS commands
• Manage settings with dotfiles
• brew command not found - use brew for installing software
• Unix/Linux Software