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Topic: midnight commander, missing editor midnight commander

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rumtumtugger Offline

Group: Members
Posts: 1
Joined: Nov. 2004

Posted: Nov. 01 2004,13:17

When i wish to edit a document via midnight commander dsl defaults to vi. I would prefer to use either the internal editor mc usually comes with. Has this been disabled/deleted to save space?
Also on the latest version of dsl 0.8.3 although the midnight commander colours are improved i can't seem to resize the application space. All suggestions welcome !!

Thanks for any advice.

cbagger01

Group: Members
Posts: 4264
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: Nov. 01 2004,22:43

My guess is that the "mcedit" default editor was stripped out of the midnight commander program in order to save on disk space.

I agree that vi is difficult to use.

My suggestion for a compromise solution is to have mc use "nano" as the default text editor instead of "vi".

Most people (like me) can use nano without much trouble. vi is a different story.

roberts

Group: Members
Posts: 4983
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: Nov. 02 2004,01:59

Apparently there is no entry in the MC ini file to indicate which external editor to use. However, mc will use the envirnoment EDITOR variable. This is even better because some will want nano, others may want scite, still some? may want zile.

To test this, do the following from a shell window

export EDITOR=nano
mc

Then press F4 on a text file, you should be in editor nano.

Once you have picked your favorite editor then do the following.
Using your editor of choice edit the hidden file .bash_profile
add the following line just below the existing EXPORT line

export EDITOR=your_fav_editor

Save .bash_profile.
Now if you are running from liveCD or compressed file system, then be sure to add the following line to your filetool.lst

home/dsl/.bash_profile

Backup and then upon each restore you will have mc using your editor of choice.