Re: Replacing nano-default-editor doesn't affect visudo

On Fri, Aug 28, 2026 at 1:20 PM Jonathan Wakely via devel
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 28 Aug 2026 at 18:05, Jonathan Wakely <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > I recently installed a new Fedora system and was recreating all my
> > preferred settings and realized that:
> >
> > 1) The https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/UseNanoByDefault change
> > for F33 never did the suggested documentation change, i.e. the Fedora
> > quick docs do not say how to replace nano by installing
> > vim-default-editor. That would be helpful.
> >
> > 2) Installing vim-default-editor doesn't help with 'sudo visudo' as
> > that command will still use nano to edit the sudoers file. That's
> > because the sudo command isn't in a login shell and so will not have
> > EDITOR set in the environment. This means that visudo doesn't care
> > about the environment, it only cares about the sudoers 'editor'
> > setting.
>
> This seems to have changed for F36 via
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1328973#c14
>
> mattdm made visudo default to nano, on the basis that it's the default
> since F33. But because 'sudo visudo' doesn't respect EDITOR by
> default, this means that nano is the default for visudo even for
> people who have installed vim-default-editor, or set EDITOR manually.
>
> Let's be honest, the users that the F33 UseNanoByDefault change
> benefits (those who don't know how to set EDITOR in their shell
> settings) probably aren't going to be running visudo anyway. And the
> people who do know how to set it find that visudo ignores their EDITOR
> setting. This isn't a great experience.
>

I use visudo, and I like that it uses nano. I don't *love* that it's
called visudo, but whatever.

That said, visudo probably needs a patch to respect the EDITOR variable.


-- 
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!
-- 
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