CDIST-TYPE__SENSIBLE_EDITOR(7) cdist CDIST-TYPE__SENSIBLE_EDITOR(7)

cdist-type__sensible_editor - Select the sensible-editor

This cdist type allows you to select the sensible-editor for a given user.

Name or path of the editor to be selected. On systems other than Debian derivatives an absolute path is required.
It is permissible to omit this parameter if --state is absent.



'present', 'absent', or 'exists'. Defaults to 'present', where:
the sensible-editor is exactly what is specified in --editor.
no sensible-editor configuration is present.
the sensible-editor will be set to what is specified in --editor, unless there already is a configuration on the target system.


__sensible_editor root --editor /bin/ed  # ed(1) is the standard
__sensible_editor noob --editor nano


This type depends upon the sensible-editor(1) script which is part of the sensible-utils package.

  • Debian 8 (jessie) or later
  • Devuan
  • Ubuntu 8.10 (intrepid) or later
  • RHEL/CentOS 7 or later (EPEL repo required)
  • Fedora 21 or later


Note: on old versions of Ubuntu the sensible-* utils are part of the debianutils package.

select-editor(1), sensible-editor(1).

Dennis Camera <dennis.camera--@--ssrq-sds-fds.ch>

Copyright (C) 2019 Dennis Camera. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

ungleich GmbH 2021

September 26, 2023 7.0.0