While setting up the cronjob for auto archiving data on my Piwik installation, I found that the default editor for Dreamhost shell accounts is set to use joe (Joe’s Own Editor). While this is a nice editor for many users, it is not as familiar to me as using vim, the opensource vi clone.
Combing through the Dreamhost wiki, I found the line in the crontab wiki article talking about exporting the editor setting by adding an entry in the .bashrc file in the root of your account. This information may have been accurate at one point, but now the shell accounts are configured to use .bashrc for the non-interactive logins and to use .bash_profile for the interactive logins.
So to update you editor on your shell account you need to add the following line to the .bash_profile file:
export editor="/usr/bin/vim" |
or
export editor="/usr/bin/vi" |
If you prefer to use emacs, you can change the line to be:
export editor="/usr/bin/emacs" |