Change the default editor for files opened in the terminal? (e.g. set it to TextEdit/Coda/Textmate)

Question

Most programs will check the $EDITOR environment variable, so you can set that to the path of TextEdit in your bashrc. Git will use this as well.

How to do this:

• Add the following to your ~/.bashrc file:
  export EDITOR="/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit"
• or just type the following command into your Terminal:
  echo "export EDITOR=\"/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit\"" >> ~/.bashrc

If you are using zsh, use ~/.zshrc instead of ~/.bashrc.

Use git config --global core.editor mate -w or git config --global core.editor open as @dmckee suggests in the comments.

Reference: http://git-scm.com/docs/git-config

For anyone coming here in 2018:

• go to iTerm -> Preferences -> Profiles -> Advanced -> Semantic History
• from the dropdown, choose Open with Editor and from the right dropdown choose your editor of choice

For OS X and Sublime Text

Make subl available.

Put this in ~/.bash_profile

[[ -s ~/.bashrc ]] && source ~/.bashrc

Put this in ~/.bashrc

export EDITOR=subl

Set your editor to point to this program:

/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit

With SVN, you should set SVN_EDITOR environment variable to:

$ export SVN_EDITOR=/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit

And then, when you try committing something, TextEdit will launch.

For Sublime Text 3:

defaults write com.apple.LaunchServices LSHandlers -array-add '{LSHandlerContentType=public.plain-text;LSHandlerRoleAll=com.sublimetext.3;}'

See Set TextMate as the default text editor on Mac OS X for details.