6.4.3.2. ...using an editor other than vi to edit the crontab?
The environment variable EDITOR can be used to specify a different editor, such as emacs , joe , or mcedit . You can set this variable temporarily by assigning a value on the same command line as the crontab command:
$ EDITOR= joe crontab -e
It may be useful to edit your ~/.bash_profile and add this line to permanently specify a different editor:
export EDITOR= mcedit