Quote Originally Posted by Durand Hicks
If I had known about editing visudo to use mcedit or nano, I wouldn't have a reason to rant about vi
Setting the environment variable EDITOR in your .profile is an old unix convention. A few command line programs will use what it points to (instead of the default vi) when they need to call an external editor. I know visudo, vipw, "crontab -e", mailx ... will follow that convention.