MacOS X uses vim as its default crontab editor. That’s not too big of an issue, I know how to use vim, but it is vastly overpowered for the simple task of editing a cron file. Nano suffices just fine for this, and I’m sure most Mac users have no idea what vim is, let alone how to use it.
So, here is how to switch your cron editor to nano, a much simpler command-line text editor.
- Press Command(⌘) + Spacebar, and type terminal into the spotlight search box in the upper right of your screen
- [Pic] In the terminal window, type the following exactly as it appears, yes the semicolon is important:
EDITOR=nano;
export EDITOR - Now when you use the terminal to run crontab -e, it will utilize the much simpler nano editor instead of vim.
![[Pic]](http://www.threevolve.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Screen-Shot-2011-12-21-at-11.00.57-AM.png){kind=link}
If you’re afraid to run commands from the terminal, I do first have to ask why you’re using cron in the first place, and then recommend CronniX, a graphical crontab editor for MacOS X.