sensible-editor - sensible editing
sensible-editor [OPTIONS...]
sensible-editor"makesensibledecisionsonwhicheditortocall. Programs in Debian can use these scripts as their default editor.
sensible-editor try to do in the following order:
if VISUAL environment variable exists, execute VISUAL [OPTIONS]
if EDITOR environment variable exists, execute EDITOR [OPTIONS]
source the contents of file ~/.selected_editor and, if SELECTED_EDITOR environment variable exists execute SELECTED_EDITOR [OPTIONS]
run editor [OPTIONS] command
finally run nano-tiny [OPTIONS] command
environ(7) for documentation of the EDITOR, VISUAL variables
select-editor(1) for changing a user's default editor.
editor(1) for default system wide editor.
This command is protected against trivial fork bomb, when user set EDITOR=sensible-editor wider loops are still possible.
Documentation of behavior of sensible-utils under a debian system is available under section 11.4 of debian-policy usually installed under /usr/share/doc/debian-policy (you might need to install debian-policy)