Choose crontab editor

General Discussion
1

How would one add a cron job using a noob friendly editor like nano?

After sudo crontab -e it loads into vim/vi. I’m embarassed to admit it, but have no idea how to work it! lol

2

I’m pretty sure you just need to set an environment variable, a quick google suggested 2 possible candidates.

export EDITOR=nano
export VISUAL=nano
sudo crontab -e

Alternatively can be added to the sudo command:

sudo EDITOR=nano crontab -e

or

sudo VISUAL=nano crontab -e
2 Likes
3

That works perfectly. Didn’t realize it’s a general Linux thing vs CL. Thanks

4

Btw., this is the same way to change the editor using e.g. visudo, which (as the name says it) loads by default vi.