Better mechanism to choose the default editor (and avoid vi if possible)?

[Chris Green]

On Mon, Jun 08, 2020 at 01:32:10PM -0400, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> On Mon, 8 Jun 2020 16:50:33 +0200, Marcus Harnisch <mh-mercurial at online.de>
> declaimed the following:
> 
> 	I tend to install a version of vim on "real" Debian -- usually gvim,
> even though I don't have a GUI running on Beaglebones, and that overwrites
> the above alternative:
> 
> debian at beaglebone:~$ ls -l /usr/bin/editor
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 Apr  6 09:26 /usr/bin/editor ->
> /etc/alternatives/editor
> debian at beaglebone:~$ ls -l /etc/alternatives/editor
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 Apr 27 16:35 /etc/alternatives/editor ->
> /usr/bin/vim.gtk3
> debian at beaglebone:~$
> 
My approach is similar except that my favourite vi clone is vile.
It's somewhat closer to 'real' vi than vim, it's available in most
distributions too.  I tend to set my default editor to vile rather
than the GUI xvile but apart from that I'm just like the above.

-- 
Chris Green