Nano’s Work Here is Done

You’ve crossed the final threshold: the moment when opening Nano feels more alien than opening Vim.

And :set ff=unix removes one of those occasional reasons for reaching for something else. Add these to the mental toolkit:

:set ff?          " What line endings have I got?
:set ff=unix      " LF
:set ff=dos       " CRLF
:set list         " Show invisible characters
:set nolist

Then the inevitable emergency:

:%s/\r$//

And, of course:

:wq

Which now has the considerable advantage of not becoming part of the file.

Nano can go back where it belongs: installed on a machine solely so you can accidentally launch it and mutter “for f**k’s sake” before exiting.

On your Linux boxes set it in the shell environment:

export EDITOR=vim
export VISUAL=vim
export SUDO_EDITOR=vim

Put those in ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc, depending on your shell, then reload:

source ~/.bashrc

If nvim is actually your preferred comfort zone, I’d use that instead:

export EDITOR=nvim
export VISUAL=nvim
export SUDO_EDITOR=nvim

EDITOR is the traditional variable used by things such as crontab -e. VISUAL is honoured by various programs as the preferred full-screen editor and often takes precedence over EDITOR.

For Git, I also like making it explicit rather than relying on environment inheritance:

git config --global core.editor "nvim"

And on Debian/Ubuntu there’s also the system alternatives mechanism:

sudo update-alternatives --config editor

Choose Vim/Neovim and things using /usr/bin/editor will follow suit.

So my setup would essentially be:

export EDITOR=nvim
export VISUAL=nvim
export SUDO_EDITOR=nvim
git config --global core.editor "nvim"

Then crontab -e, git commit, systemctl edit, etc. stop unexpectedly dropping you into Nano.

Why the SUDO_EDITOR ?

There is also a security reason sudo doesn’t blindly preserve EDITOR: an editor can execute arbitrary commands, so allowing a user to influence which executable a privileged command launches matters. On your own machines where you’re already in sudoers, that’s mostly a policy decision rather than a revelation.