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Motivation Behind This Cheatsheet

I wanted to change my default text editor in the command line from pico to vi

The Cheatsheet

find out where the binary file for vi is:

which vi
>/bin/vi

modify the EDITOR environment variable  ** see 'Further Discussion'

export EDITOR=/usr/bin/vi

This adjustment will last for this session only, so add the above to the ~/.bashrc file. The .bashrc file is used to setup the bash shell preferences for the the user.

Further Discussion

This worked for Ubuntu. but for other distros (as I found out with my web server), you might have to use the environment variable VISUAL. so, export VISUAL=/usr/bin/vi also, "which vi" can be changed to suite your desired text editor like "which nano"