Why I've got no crontab entry on OS X when using vim?

Just follow these steps:

1. In Terminal: crontab -e.
2. Press i to go into vim's insert mode.

3. Type your cron job, for example:

   30 * * * * /usr/bin/curl --silent --compressed http://example.com/crawlink.php
   

4. Press Esc to exit vim's insert mode.

5. Type ZZ to exit vim (must be capital letters).
6. You should see the following message: crontab: installing new crontab. You can verify the crontab file by using crontab -l.

Note however that this might not work depending on the content of your ~/.vimrc file.

I've never had this problem, but I create a ~/.crontab file and edit that (which allows me to back it up, Time Machine or otherwise), then run

crontab ~/.crontab

Has worked for me for 20+ years across many flavors of unix.

NOTE: the answer that says to use the ZZ command doesn't work for me on my Mavericks system, but this is probably due to something in my vim configuration because if I start with a pristine .vimrc, the accepted answer works. My answer might work for you if the other solution doesn't.

On MacOS X, according to the crontab manpage, the crontab temporary file that gets created with crontab -e needs to be edited in-place. Vim doesn't edit in-place by default (but it might do some special case to support crontab -e), so if your $EDITOR environment variable is set to vi (the default) or vim, editing the crontab will always fail.

To get Vim to edit the file in-place, you need to do:

:setlocal nowritebackup

That should enable you to update the crontab when you do crontab -e with the :wq or ZZ commands.

You can add an autocommand in your .vimrc to make this automatically work when editing crontabs:

autocmd FileType crontab setlocal nowritebackup

Another way is to add the setlocal nowritebackup to ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/crontab.vim, which will be loaded by Vim automatically when you're editing a crontab file if you have the Filetype plugin enabled. You can also check for the OS if you're using your vim files across multiple platforms:

""In ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/crontab.vim
if has("mac")
  setlocal nowritebackup
endif