sensible-editor - Man Page

• Open a file in the default editor: sensible-editor path/to/file
• Open a file in the default editor, with the cursor at the end of the file: sensible-editor + path/to/file
• Open a file in the default editor, with the cursor at the beginning of line 10: sensible-editor +10 path/to/file
• Open 3 files in vertically split editor windows at the same time: sensible-editor -O3 path/to/file1 path/to/file2 path/to/file3

tldr.sh

sensible-editor [OPTIONS...]

sensible-editor makes sensible decisions on which editor to call. Programs in Debian can invoke this script to get a good default editor.

sensible-editor looks for an appropriate choice of editor in a series of places, and uses the first candidate that works. It starts by checking environment variables, followed by a variable defined via select-editor, then tries the default editor command defined by the alternatives system, with a series of hard-coded command names as fallbacks.

Variables will be skipped if unset or null, but may include extra whitespace-separated parameters such as a --verbose flag. Once sensible-editor has a candidate commandline, it will try to run it (passing on the arguments it was given as the files to be edited). If this fails because the command couldn't be executed (exit code 126) or was not found (exit code 127), it tries the next candidate.

The specific candidates sensible-editor tries, in order, are:

• $VISUAL - see environ(7)
• $EDITOR - see environ(7)
• $SENSIBLE_EDITOR
• $SELECTED_EDITOR - see select-editor(1)
• editor - see editor(1), update-alternatives(1)
• nano
• nano-tiny
• vi

If all of these fail, sensible-editor errors out. This system is designed to make it easy for individual users to set a personal and/or temporary default, overriding the system-wide defaults.

This command takes precautions against launching itself in an infinite loop if a user sets EDITOR=sensible-editor but indirect loops are still possible.

sensible-browser(1), sensible-pager(1), select-editor(1), environ(7), editor(1), update-alternatives(1)

The behavior of sensible-utils under a Debian system is documented in section 11.4 of Debian-Policy, available under /usr/share/doc/debian-policy if debian-policy is installed, or online at https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/

cdist-type__sensible_editor(7), nmudiff(1), select-editor(1).