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...vironment variable EDITOR point to a script you control which then runs over possible alternatives. As for the conjecture 'it is much more common to write code from ...' I would love to see some empirics across a properly surveyed R user base. The love of some power users for codespaces / devcontainers notwithstanding, 'the most common' environment for writing R code is likely still what it always was, a single windows desktop. Anyway, thanks for raising this. I can look into making the Debian (and hence Ubuntu) package switch to 'editor' over the vi fallback. Dirk -- dirk.ed...

It looks like R has defaulted to using 'vi' for file.edit() (via EDITOR since ~24 years ago[1][2]. These days I think it is much more common to write code from lightweight environments, e.g. Docker files which strip all unnecessary commands. On such machines, it is not safe to assume 'vi' is installed, and it's not uncommon to encounter an issue like I did again today[3] where