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How to Edit Your Crontab Using Vim

May 26, 2023

If you’re a vim user like I am and you run crontab -e and get dropped into nano, you’re likely to make the same face as a baby eating a lemon.

A baby eating a lemon

Not fun, but there’s a fix.

Update your shell configuration file (.bashrc, .zshrc, .profile, whatever), to include the following:

bash
alias crontab=”export VISUAL=vim; crontab”

Then you can simply run the command normally to edit your crontab with vim.

bash
crontab -e

No more nano, and good riddance.