Is there a way to make files opened for editing in the terminal open in Textedit instead?
For example, where a command might open a file for editing (like git commit
), instead of opening that file in vim or emacs, it would open in Textedit (or perhaps another text editing application of your choosing, such as Coda or Sublime).
And as a bonus question, is there any way to specifically configure git to automatically open the file created after running git commit
in an editor from the applications directory?
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 OS X and Sublime Text
Make subl
available.
Put this in ~/.bash_profile
[[ -s ~/.bashrc ]] && source ~/.bashrc
Put this in ~/.bashrc
export EDITOR=subl
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
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.