Getting Quickly to use Gvim instead of Gedit

Question

How do I get Quickly to use Gvim (or just vim in a terminal) as its default text editor instead of Gedit?

If this can be done, I must be doing it wrong...

Ubuntu 10.10 AMD64.

Answer 1

I assume you mean you want to change the editor that Quickly loads when you ask it to.

Well I did some sleuthing... I'll show you what I did followed by the answer.

1. I fired off this command:

   sudo find / -name "*quickly*" -exec grep gedit {} \;
   

   That searches for all files with quickly in and then greps them for gedit. It was a long shot -- I should have refined the search so it was any paths with quickly in but it matched!

   Binary file /usr/share/quickly/templates/ubuntu-application/internal/quicklyutils.pyc matches
       editor = "gedit"
   

2. I opened up /usr/share/quickly/templates/ubuntu-application/internal/quicklyutils.py (not the compiled version) in nano, searched for gedit and saw:

   def get_quickly_editors():
       '''Return prefered editor for ubuntu-application template'''
   
       editor = "gedit"
       default_editor = os.environ.get("EDITOR")
       if not default_editor:
           default_editor = os.environ.get("SELECTED_EDITOR")
       if default_editor:
          editor = default_editor
       return editor
   

3. From that you can see it asks for the environment value EDITOR!

   Just run your quickly commands as:

   env EDITOR=gvim quickly edit
   

   or export it to persist

   export EDITOR=gvim
   quickly edit
   

   Add the export line to your ~/.bashrc line if you want it to persist between sessions.

Answer 2

After you install GVim , using Synaptic Package Manager, then it should be available in the Applications menu and you can right click on it and add the application shortcut to your desktop.

Answer 3

What about sudo update-alternatives –config editor? It will change the system default editor so you do not have to change individual program preferences..

From: Old article, but should still work..