Change Sqitch editor to Vim

Beau Barker, Sep 12, 2021. ✎

Sqitch only uses an editor for certain things such as entering a note for a new migration, but if you use sqitch add --note (or -n) it’s not really necessary to change this unless you really want to.

How to change the editor

If you installed Sqitch (instead of using the docker image), the easiest way is to create/edit the config file (such as ~/.sqitch/sqitch.conf):

[core]
    editor = vim

If like me you use the docker image sqitch/sqitch from Docker hub, unfortunately it doesn’t include vim in the container, so I had to:

Fork the docker-sqitch repository.
Edit the Dockerfile to replace nano with vim. Also change SQITCH_EDITOR from nano to 'vim --clean'. (without --clean I had errors related to Python scripting).
docker build -t sqitch/sqitch --build-arg VERSION=1.1.0 .