How to switch the editor in mc (midnight commander) from nano to mcedit?

Question

Using ubuntu 10.10 the editor in mc (midnight commander) is nano. How can i switch to the internal mc editor (mcedit)?

Solution 1

Press the following keys in order, one at a time:

1. F9 Activates the top menu.
2. o Selects the Option menu.
3. c Opens the configuration dialog.
4. i Toggles the use internal edit option.
5. s Saves your preferences.

Solution 2

Run MC as usual. On the command line right above the bottom row of menu selections type select-editor. This should open a menu with a list of all of your installed editors. This is working for me on all my current linux machines.

Solution 3

If you want to leave mc and system settings as it is now, you may just run it like

$ EDITOR=mcedit mc

Solution 4

In user's home folder (/home/<user-name>/) there should be a file named .selected_editor. One can edit it and change it there to a desired editor.

# Generated by /usr/bin/select-editor
SELECTED_EDITOR="/path/to/mcedit"

Or remove this file to force MC to ask about default editor on first edit.

Solution 5

Open Midnight Commander, go to Options -> Configuration and check "use internal editor" Hit save and you are done.

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Comments

[trusktr]

Can you also add how to change the editor to any other editor?

[weima]

It would be better to specify a way to change this from the command line, but not by changing the OS default editor.

[Nickolai Leschov]

This is great, but is there a way to do the same in the command line, say, by adding/changing an environment variable? I'd like to automate this.

[Sledge Hammer]

Thank you! That was the only solution that worked for me with the mc version in the Ubuntu 14.04 repositories.

[pshirishreddy]

Looks it has changed to 't' instead of 'i' image

[marlar]

Doesn't work for me. I get a "Command not found" error from Bash.

[hermeslm]

This solution is useful in Ubuntu (not tested in Debian) but in Redhat or Centos you need to do something like this blog rhel-centos-set-default-editor-to-nano

[Pablo Bianchi]

@trusktr to change to other editor you need to uncheck the option and set the EDITOR environment variable, easily with select-editor

[Vassilis]

This is the best way to also set a custom editor like micro.

[Admin]

@hermeslm, Thank you ^_^