Although this is a UNIX hint, it applies to Mac OS X as well. A previous hint,
Remove insecure root 'grace period' from sudo, had a comment about not knowing
vi, and that any editor could be used since
visudo is just a wrapper that does some sanity checking before writing to disk. To stay on the safe side, it's best to change the default command line editor with the
$EDITOR variable. An added benefit is that any command line tools that take advantage of the
$EDITOR variable will also use your editor of choice.
The
$EDITOR variable can be set from the command line by executing
export EDITOR=youreditor for the bash shell, or
setenv EDITOR youreditor for the tcsh shell.
To make the variable persistent, add the
export statement to your
.bashrc or
.bash_profile, or the
setenv statement to your
.cshrc or
.tcshrc file.