Change the default editor for files opened in the terminal? (e.g. set it to TextEdit/Coda/Textmate)

Question

Is there a way to make files opened for editing in the terminal open in Textedit instead?

For example, where a command might open a file for editing (like git

Answer 1

Set your editor to point to this program:

/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit

With SVN, you should set SVN_EDITOR environment variable to:

$ export SVN_EDITOR=/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit

And then, when you try committing something, TextEdit will launch.

Answer 2

If you want the editor to work with git operations, setting the $EDITOR environment variable may not be enough, at least not in the case of Sublime - e.g. if you want to rebase, it will just say that the rebase was successful, but you won't have a chance to edit the file in any way, git will just close it straight away:

git rebase -i HEAD~
Successfully rebased and updated refs/heads/master.

If you want Sublime to work correctly with git, you should configure it using:

git config --global core.editor "sublime -n -w"

I came here looking for this and found the solution in this gist on github.