Make TextMate the default shell editor

  1. Editing from the shell
  2. The -W option of TextEdit is not working for me
  3. TextMate is fine
  4. No editor setting required

Editing from the shell

My Mac is set up to use Oh My Zsh as a shell prompt and I prefer to avoid using nano or pico when editing files from the shell. My global .gitconfig and my .zshrc files are modified in a way to start up the built-in Mac editor TextEdit for such cases. This should go in a way to start the editor from the shell, complete the editing in the editor while the shell command is waiting for you to close the editor, returning to the shell and going on with I you wanted to do.

The -W option of TextEdit is not working for me

The command for opening TextEdit from the shell, and waiting for returning, is documented as:

open -e -W -n <file-to-edit>

With the options:

-e
Open the <file-to-edit> with TextEdit
-n
Open a new instance of TextEdit, even if TextEdit is already open.
-W
Wait until the instance of TextEdit is closed again.

Recently I noticed the waiting is not working anymore. When closing the editor, the shell is waiting forever and I cannot proceed with what I wanted to do. I have to stop then the waiting process by pressing CTRL C. I cannot tell if it´s a problem of TextEdit or of Oh My Zsh.

TextMate is fine

Because of the difficulties with TextEdit, I installed TextMate. The waiting works properly for TextMate, and it is a lean and easy to use editor on the Mac. To make TextMate your default shell editor, you have to:

  1. Go to TextMate → Settings → Terminal and install the TextMate shell support.
  2. Copy the line sh export EDITOR="/usr/local/bin/mate -w" and replace in your ~/.zshrc file (or your ~/.bashrc, depending what shell you are using) the line that is starting with export EDITOR ... with the copied content.
  3. In addition I have created an alias in my ~/.zshrc file by adding the line sh alias edit="/usr/local/bin/mate -w" which allows me to edit any file from the shell by typing sh edit <file-to-edit>

No ~/.gitconfig editor setting required

With the above TextMate setup there is no need to have any editor config inside of the global ~/.gitconfig file. If you have there an entry like editor = ..., you can remove that line. Still, whenever Git requires to edit something, TextMate will get used.