How to change visudo editor from nano to vim? [duplicate]

Question

This question already has an answer here:

• Change the default editor when sudo visudo 2 answers

When I use visudo, it always opens it with nano editor. How to change the editor to vim?

Answer 1

Type sudo update-alternatives --config editor

You will get a text like below.

There are 4 choices for the alternative editor (providing /usr/bin/editor).

  Selection    Path                Priority   Status
------------------------------------------------------------
* 0            /bin/nano            40        auto mode
  1            /bin/ed             -100       manual mode
  2            /bin/nano            40        manual mode
  3            /usr/bin/vim.basic   30        manual mode
  4            /usr/bin/vim.tiny    10        manual mode

Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number: 3

Find vim.basic or vim.tiny selection number. Type it and press enter. Next time when you open visudo your editor will be vim

Answer 2

If you want just to make your user use by default a different editor, add

export EDITOR=vim; 

in your .profile (or wherever you keep your startup environment if using a shell different from bash). Log out, log in, check that the variable is set:

[romano:~] % env | grep EDI
EDITOR=vim

and now all the programs that call an editor (and are well written) will default to vim for your user.

As noticed by @EliahKagan (thanks!) in the comment, this will not work for visudo: since you are supposed to call it using sudo, when you do

sudo visudo

the sudo command will sanitize (read: delete) most environment variables before rising privileges --- and it's a good thing it does. So the change will not percolate to visudo. To still have it working, you have to call it like:

sudo EDITOR=vim visudo

Finally, as hinted here, you can also add a line to your /etc/sudoers file near the top that reads:

Defaults editor=/usr/bin/vim 

A word of warning: when modifying your sudoers configuration, keep a terminal open with a root shell in it (with sudo -i). You never know, and you can easily get locked out of root.