Change the default editor for files opened in the terminal? (e.g. set it to TextEdit/Coda/Textmate)

Is there a way to make files opened for editing in the terminal open in Textedit instead?

For example, where a command might open a file for editing (like git commit), instead of opening that file in vim or emacs, it would open in Textedit (or perhaps another text editing application of your choosing, such as Coda or Sublime).

And as a bonus question, is there any way to specifically configure git to automatically open the file created after running git commit in an editor from the applications directory?

Most programs will check the $EDITOR environment variable, so you can set that to the path of TextEdit in your bashrc. Git will use this as well.

How to do this:

• Add the following to your ~/.bashrc file:
  export EDITOR="/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit"
• or just type the following command into your Terminal:
  echo "export EDITOR=\"/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit\"" >> ~/.bashrc

If you are using zsh, use ~/.zshrc instead of ~/.bashrc.

Use git config --global core.editor mate -w or git config --global core.editor open as @dmckee suggests in the comments.

Reference: http://git-scm.com/docs/git-config

For anyone coming here in 2018:

• go to iTerm -> Preferences -> Profiles -> Advanced -> Semantic History
• from the dropdown, choose Open with Editor and from the right dropdown choose your editor of choice

For OS X and Sublime Text

Make subl available.

Put this in ~/.bash_profile

[[ -s ~/.bashrc ]] && source ~/.bashrc

Put this in ~/.bashrc

export EDITOR=subl

Set your editor to point to this program:

/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit

With SVN, you should set SVN_EDITOR environment variable to:

$ export SVN_EDITOR=/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit

And then, when you try committing something, TextEdit will launch.

For Sublime Text 3:

defaults write com.apple.LaunchServices LSHandlers -array-add '{LSHandlerContentType=public.plain-text;LSHandlerRoleAll=com.sublimetext.3;}'

See Set TextMate as the default text editor on Mac OS X for details.

If you want the editor to work with git operations, setting the $EDITOR environment variable may not be enough, at least not in the case of Sublime - e.g. if you want to rebase, it will just say that the rebase was successful, but you won't have a chance to edit the file in any way, git will just close it straight away:

git rebase -i HEAD~
Successfully rebased and updated refs/heads/master.

If you want Sublime to work correctly with git, you should configure it using:

git config --global core.editor "sublime -n -w"

I came here looking for this and found the solution in this gist on github.

make Sublime Text 3 your default text editor: (Restart required)

defaults write com.apple.LaunchServices LSHandlers -array-add "{LSHandlerContentType=public.plain-text;LSHandlerRoleAll=com.sublimetext.3;}"

make sublime then your default git text editor git config --global core.editor "subl -W"