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I am trying to figure out why I don't have syntax highlighting when editing my crontab.
I have both $EDITOR and $VISUAL set to /usr/bin/vim:
> echo $EDITOR
/usr/bin/vim
> echo $VISUAL
/usr/bin/vim
If I save the crontab to a file and edit it with vim syntax highlighting is enabled.
> crontab -l > saved_cronab
> /usr/bin/vim saved_crontab
And if I use :syntax on while editing the crotab nothing changes
How can I enable highlighting when editing crontab with crontab -e?
vim doesn't know, that your file saved_crontab is a crontab. Therefore, you don't get a special syntax highlighting for crontabs. Setting the filetype to crontab worked for me. I used:
:set ft=crontab
You can see the value of filetype with:
:set ft?
# vim: ft=crontab to the top of the file. However modelines are disabled by default for security reasons as root and by some distributions.
EDITOR or VISUAL is irrelevant, since OP ran vim directly. Further clarification would improve the answer, but the information in this question addresses the problem.
Mar 27, 2016 at 18:32
crontab -e. When EDITOR isn't set, crontab seems to actually be using vi, which while it does run vim, disables syntax highlighting.
Did you export these variables (export EDITOR VISUAL)?
export is an answer, but you are right - I bit misunderstand "you can answer but not comment" policy. Sorry about that. Should I remove my another "clarification request" (serverfault.com/questions/490255/…) ?
Mar 22, 2013 at 5:47
The accepted answer is quite poorly explained IMHO, so here's something more to help people solve this issue.
I still fail to understand why crontab refuses to pick the editor specified with
sudo update-alternatives --config editor
in my case:
There are 4 choices for the alternative editor (providing /usr/bin/editor).
Selection Path Priority Status ------------------------------------------------------------ 0 /bin/nano 40 auto mode 1 /bin/ed -100 manual mode 2 /bin/nano 40 manual mode * 3 /usr/bin/vim.basic 30 manual mode 4 /usr/bin/vim.tiny 10 manual mode
And in fact everything correctly points to vim.basic:
#> ll /usr/bin/editor lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 Oct 20 2014 /usr/bin/editor -> /etc/alternatives/editor #> ll /etc/alternatives/editor lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 Jun 20 2016 /etc/alternatives/editor -> /usr/bin/vim.basic #> ll /usr/bin/vim.basic -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2.4M Nov 24 2016 /usr/bin/vim.basic #> ll /usr/bin/vim lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 Oct 20 2014 /usr/bin/vim -> /etc/alternatives/vim
But crontab still doesn't care. So, as correctly pointed by dsznajder, the solution is to explicitly tell crontab what the $EDITOR is, via environment variable.
One can export it via .bashrc or .profile, but given that crontab is the only one to ignore /etc/alternatives/, I preferred to create an alias just for him to make him feel the shame of requiring a custom alias to work (just like for dmesg -T).
alias crontab='EDITOR=vim crontab'
That's it, fixed ✔ :)
This worked for me:
EDITOR="/usr/bin/vim"
export EDITOR
Add this to ~/.bash_profile to enable this for current user.
Add this to /etc/profile/any_file_you_like to enable this for all users.
