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I generally set both VISUAL and EDITOR environment variables to the same thing, but what's the difference? why would I set them differently? when developing apps why should I choose to look at VISUAL before EDITOR or vice versa?

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The EDITOR editor should be able to work without use of "advanced" terminal functionality (like old ed or ex mode of vi). It was used on teletype terminals.

A VISUAL editor could be a full screen editor as vi or emacs.

E.g. if you invoke an editor through bash (using C-x C-e), bash will try first VISUAL editor and then, if VISUAL fails (because terminal does not support a full-screen editor), it tries EDITOR.

Nowadays, you can leave EDITOR unset or set it to vi -e.

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Most applications treat $VISUAL as a shell snippet that they append the (shell-quoted) file name to, but some treat it as the name of an executable which they may or may not search in $PATH. So it's best to set VISUAL (and EDITOR) to the full path to an executable (which could be a wrapper script if you want e.g. options). – Gilles Dec 15 '10 at 18:27

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