How to change primary text editor

Welcome to Apple Discussions:
If you are referring to the terminal, there is no "default" editor.
Do mean you are looking for an alias for "edit" or something like that?
I use TextWrangler in both the GUI and terminal as the default for most editing, but it's not a default.

If you wish to change the default in the GUI, right click the file in question and select "Get Info"
In the Get Info window under open with, choose your editor and then press the Change all button.

Also these questions and future ones of this kind should be posted in the Unix forum here:
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=735

Message was edited by: nerowolfe

Best to ask this in the Unix forum:

http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=735

bfarman wrote:
There must be a way to set the default editor in the terminal. For instance, when I call chpass it pulls up vi as the editor.

As Tom and I have both noted, you should be asking in the Unix forum.
BTW, I have no idea what you mean by "call" or "pulls up" and I have been using Linux from the day it was born.
Again, please use the Unix forum where we all speak grep and make dep. 🙂

For instance, when I call chpass it pulls up vi as the editor

If you read the man page for chpass, it will default to vi unless you set the $EDITOR environmental variable. $EDITOR is not set by default. Set the variable in the appropriate shell config file.
For tcsh and csh->
setenv VISUAL /path/to/your/favorite/editor
setenv EDITOR /path/to/your/favorite/editor
in your .login file.
For sh,ksh,bash,and zsh->
export VISUAL="/path/to/your/favorite/editor"
export EDITOR="/path/to/your/favorite/editor"
In sh and ksh in your .profile file. In bash your .bash_profile or .bashrc file. In zsh in your .zprofile file.