How to set visudo to use a different editor than the default on Fedora?

Question

Fedora 14 uses vi by default when one runs visudo. Is there a way to change this to something else?

Answer 1

Adding Defaults editor=/path/to/editor in the sudoers file will cause visudo to use the specified editor for changes.

Additionally, if your sudo package has been built with --with-env-editor, as is the default on some Linux distributions, you can also set the EDITOR environment variable by executing export EDITOR=/path/to/editor. Performed on the command line this will revert as soon as that shell session is terminated, setting the variable in a ~/.bashrc or /etc/profile will cause the change to persist.

Answer 2

A normal unix program that wants to invoke an editor will run the program whose name is in the EDITOR or VISUAL environment variable, and if the variable is unset, a system-dependent default. Many, but not all, programs check both EDITOR and VISUAL; the distinction is long obsolete (once you would run EDITOR on a teletype and VISUAL on a “glass” terminal…) so you should set both to the same value. There is some disagreement as to whether the contents of the variable should be the full path to an executable, an executable name that's looked up in $PATH, or a shell snippet, so you should stick to a path to an executable not containing any shell metacharacter. The system default when neither variable is set is traditionally vi, though some distributions have changed this to a more newbie-friendly editor such as nano.

visudo checks both VISUAL and EDITOR (this can be compiled out, presumably to dissuade root from using an editor whose security the distribution maker doesn't trust, but even OpenBSD doesn't do this).