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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-01T12:26:05+00:00

I can’t seem to change the default bash editor in OSX Lion terminal. I’ve

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I can’t seem to change the default bash editor in OSX Lion terminal.

I’ve tried setting:

export EDITOR='<editor symlink with parameter>'

in both ~/.bashrc & ~/.bash_profile . The symlink is subl, and the parameter is -w.
from the prompt it is:

subl -w

I have restarted terminal after each but every time I enter:

edit test-file.md

it opens TextWrangler (not the editor I’ve set). I’ve tried opening the symlink from the command line with no problem. I realize that I should probably just get used to typing the symlink, but the anal side of me wants to know why I can’t set the default editor.

Any help with this trivial problem would be appreciated, thanks in advance!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’m not even sure what edit command is. i don’t have in on my Mac OS X Lion. Whatever it is, sounds like it ignores the EDITOR env variable and uses your MacOS X application settings.
    What you want can be accomplished with the alias shell command though:

    alias edit=/path/to/vim
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