Open emacs in a terminal when editing crontab

Question

I have setup emacs as my default editor in /etc/profile. When I want to use emacs in a terminal. I open it with the -nw option. How can I have the same behavior when doing a crontab -e preventing it to open in a window?

Answer 1

You have to use

    export EDITOR="emacs -nw"

with the quotes, and it should work as expected.

Answer 2

If you think starting emacs every time is slow, you can also use:

export EDITOR="emacsclient -t"

However, you will have to start the emacs server once using:

emacs --daemon