Force Terminal to Use Gedit for any Text Editing - not vim

Question

I'm learning to program. While following this mission, I typed git commit, which opened up vim. I don't know or want to know vim (no offense to vim lovers). I'd like to have:

1. terminal open gedit ever time it try to do text editing from the terminal; and
2. gedit release the terminal for further use.

How do I do that?

UPDATE:

Ok. I'm close, but I must be missing something.

Added /Applications/gedit.app/Contents/MacOS/ to /etc/paths

Because I wasn't root, I had to save it to my desktop. Then I had to move it to /etc, so, terminal handled that.

sudo mv paths /etc

Then I changed the editor.

git config --global core.editor "gedit"

after typing

git commit

I received.

error: cannot run gedit: No such file or directory
error: There was a problem with the editor 'gedit'.
Please supply the message using either -m or -F option.

UPDATED 2: Relaunching terminal fixed the problem.

Thanks everyone.

Answer 1

In order to do this, type

open -a gedit path/to/file

to open and run the gedit application (using the -a switch issues a command to look for gedit in your /Applications directory).

Alternatively, add /Applications/gedit.app/Contents/MacOS/ to your $PATH, which should allow you to open gedit from the terminal as well by simply typing

gedit

Answer 2

You should edit your git configuration file regarding which editor to use.

As noted here How do I make git use the editor of my choice for commits?

From man git-commit:

ENVIRONMENT AND CONFIGURATION VARIABLES

The editor used to edit the commit log message will be chosen from the GIT_EDITOR environment variable, the core.editor configuration variable, the VISUAL environment variable, or the EDITOR environment variable (in that order).

Answer 3

See this post http://eddieringle.com/how-to-properly-configure-git-to-use-gedit-as-its-default-editor/

and excerpt below

git config --global core.editor "gedit -w -s"
    -w: wait for Gedit to save the file and exit before continuing
    -s: runs that instance of Gedit in standalone mode to let gedit return after that window is closed.

Answer 4

If your shell is bash or zsh, open your ${HOME}/.profile (not your .bashrc since you don't have to do this setting on any subshell you will run) with gedit or vim.

Insert the following line:

EDITOR=/Applications/gedit.app/Contents/MacOS/gedit
export EDITOR

( You don't have to change your PATH for this and moreover this might cause other side effects which might waste you a lot of time to analyze. )

Save and close (vim: ESC,:,w,q).

Open a new shell window to check your modification is safe, and load your ${HOME}/.profile:

. ~/.profile

and check that gedit is correctly called from git. If it's OK, then you might restart your session and this is now fixed forever.

NB.: With this modification, gedit will be used in any context where a command would need to call an editor for you.