Use a graphical Linux Editor for VCS Commits

1. Using gedit

If your main editor is the graphical GNOME editor gedit you can also use it when doing version control system commits, crontab edits, visudo and others things on the command line. All you need is to set it to the $EDITOR environment variable.

The only thing you need to be careful about is wether the editor detaches from the terminal right after starting. This must not happen as the calling command (e.g. "git commit -a") would never know when the editing is finished. So for gedit you have to add the "-w" switch to keep it waiting.

export EDITOR="gedit -w"

2. Using Emacs

For XEmacs simply set

export EDITOR=xemacs

With Emacs itself you also have the possibility to use server mode by running emacs-client (see "Starting emacs automatically" in the EmacsWiki). To do so set

export ALTERNATE_EDITOR=emacs EDITOR=emacsclient

3. Using Other Editors

If you use the goold old Nirvana Editor nedit you can simply

export EDITOR=nedit

the same goes for the KDE editor kate:

export EDITOR=kate

and if you want it really hurting try something like this:

export EDITOR=eclipse
export VISUAL=oowriter

4. $EDITOR and sudo

When using sudo you need to pass $EDITOR along to the root environment. This can be done by using "sudo -e" e.g.

sudo -e visudo

Wether passing the enviroment to root is a good idea might be a good question though...

Have fun!