SENSIBLE-EDITOR(1)

💖 SENSIBLE-EDITOR(1) — General Commands Manual 💖

✨ NAME ✨

okay so the name is sensible-editor, and its whole job is to launch a sensibly chosen text editor 🖊️💅

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

sensible-editor [OPTIONS...]

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

bestie, sensible-editor makes sensible decisions about which editor to call so you don't have to 🫶 Programs in Debian can invoke this script to get a good default editor, and it's giving reliable energy ✨

okay so here's the vibe: sensible-editor looks for an appropriate editor in a series of places and uses the first candidate that works 👑 It starts by checking environment variables, then a variable defined via select-editor, then the default editor command set by the alternatives system, and then a lineup of hard-coded command names as backups 💜

variables get skipped if they're unset or null, but they can include extra whitespace-separated parameters, like a --verbose flag 🦋 Once sensible-editor has a candidate commandline, it tries to run it, passing along the arguments it got as the files to be edited 📝 If that fails because the command couldn't be executed (exit code 126) or was not found (exit code 127), it just moves on to the next candidate. no drama 💅

the candidates it 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(1)
• nano-tiny(1)
• vi(1)

if ALL of these fail, sensible-editor errors out 😭 that's the one time it gives up on you, so make sure at least one of them works 🙈

iykyk, this whole setup is designed so that individual users can set a personal and/or temporary default that overrides the system-wide defaults 🧚 main character energy for your editor choice ✨

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

okay these are the besties to check out next 🫶 sensible-browser(1), sensible-pager(1), select-editor(1), environ(7), editor(1), update-alternatives(1) 💖

👑 CONFORMING TO 👑

the behavior of sensible-utils on a Debian system is documented in section 11.4 of Debian-Policy 📖 You can find it under /usr/share/doc/debian-policy if debian-policy is installed, or online at https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ 🌈

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bestie, that's the whole tea ☕️🍓 Debian, 28 Aug 2022, SENSIBLE-EDITOR(1), we love a well-documented editor 💅✨