Programs don't see fish environment variables

Question

If I set the EDITOR environment variable to emacs in bash, running crontab -e will open the crontab in emacs. When I set it in fish with

set -U EDITOR emacs

crontab opens with vim. What can I do to get crontab to open with emacs?

Answer 1

In fish, if you want programs to be able to see environment variables, you have to use set -x. That is, to set the EDITOR variable, you should use

set -Ux EDITOR emacs