How to set visudo to use a different editor than the default on Fedora?

Adding Defaults editor=/path/to/editor in the sudoers file will cause visudo to use the specified editor for changes.

Additionally, if your sudo package has been built with --with-env-editor, as is the default on some Linux distributions, you can also set the EDITOR environment variable by executing export EDITOR=/path/to/editor. Performed on the command line this will revert as soon as that shell session is terminated, setting the variable in a ~/.bashrc or /etc/profile will cause the change to persist.

The following

• works for distros that use alternatives (originally just Debian and its forks, but now most major distros, IIUC).

• has the advantage that

  1. you won't need to edit sudoers first with its default editor
  2. it works even if package=sudo has not been built with --with-env-editor

From a commandline:

1. Run sudo update-alternatives --config editor
2. Choose desired editor from the (text-mode) menu. If you don't see the editor you want, you probably need to install it; cancel, do that, and repeat.

sudo visudo should now open the editor of your choice.

A normal unix program that wants to invoke an editor will run the program whose name is in the EDITOR or VISUAL environment variable, and if the variable is unset, a system-dependent default. Many, but not all, programs check both EDITOR and VISUAL; the distinction is long obsolete (once you would run EDITOR on a teletype and VISUAL on a “glass” terminal…) so you should set both to the same value. There is some disagreement as to whether the contents of the variable should be the full path to an executable, an executable name that's looked up in $PATH, or a shell snippet, so you should stick to a path to an executable not containing any shell metacharacter. The system default when neither variable is set is traditionally vi, though some distributions have changed this to a more newbie-friendly editor such as nano.

visudo checks both VISUAL and EDITOR (this can be compiled out, presumably to dissuade root from using an editor whose security the distribution maker doesn't trust, but even OpenBSD doesn't do this).