How create a crontab on mac?

Question

I'm trying to create a crontab on mac.

I've tried crontab -e which takes me to what appears to be an empty file opened with vim. I make no changes and simply press esc, :, w, then q to save and exit.

But when I try crontab -l I see:

crontab -l
crontab: no crontab for st

I tried exactly the same thing as root but I get the same outcome

MacBook-Pro:~ root# crontab -u st -e
crontab: no crontab for st - using an empty one
-- I save an exit vim as above --

crontab: no changes made to crontab
MacBook-Pro:~ root# crontab -u st -l
crontab: no crontab for st

I'm struggling to figure out why this isn't working as expected

Answer 1

This will indeed open a new crontab in vim (presuming you don't already have one)

crontab -e

If it creates a new crontab for you, it will start empty, hit the space bar to add something to the crontab before saving and exiting

So TL;DR

1. crontab -e creates a new crontab if you don't already have one
2. If it's a new (empty) crontab, press i to 'insert' using vim, then press spacebar a few times so it's not empty
3. Save and exit vim by pressing these keys (in order): esc, :, w, then q

Answer 2

My issue was that I had $VISUAL configured to use Visual Studio Code. I temporarily overrode it: VISUAL=/usr/bin/vim. Then after crontab -e it printed crontab: installing new crontab. A follow up crontab -l printed the saved file.

I'm sure there is a way to use VSCode, but this is a quick workaround.