Setting nano as default editor not working for crontab with fish shell

Question

I want to set nano as default editor for crontab on my Mac.

This works:

VISUAL=nano crontab -e

but this don't work

set -U VISUAL nano
crontab -e

here still vim is used as default editor

ECHO $VISUAL 

shows

nano 

as value.

Any ideas where is my mistake?

Answer 1

set -U VISUAL nano only sets the variable within Fish. If you want to make it visible also in binaries started by the shell you need to export it, e.g. by using set -Ux VISUAL nano.

For more details

• Variable Scope
• Exporting Variables