I don't remember what program it was but I once went to configure something, and the command to "open settings" essentially just opened a text file in vim.

Being a nano scrub that took me a second to get out of.

[–] PoolloverNathan@programming.dev 12 points 17 hours ago

It probably opened it in ${VISUAL:-${EDITOR:-vim}}; usually setting one of those variables in e.g. bashrc will avoid future vim.

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 6 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Sometimes, programs that need to start up an editor will honour the $EDITOR environment variable, which should contain the name of, or full path to, a user's preferred editor.

It's not set by default though, and a lot of things will naturally default to vi or even ed. Something to be set in a .profile, .bashrc or similar.

$VISUAL is another variable that is used for similar purposes.

The resemblance to certain two letter commands is not entirely a coincidence.

[–] pmk@piefed.social 1 points 6 hours ago

I learned enough ed(1) to be able to do quick edits in smaller files, and it is actually quite nice to have that simplicity without all the bells and whistles of modern editors.