How to change primary text editor (terminal)

I use the following statement in my .bash_profile file:
export EDITOR="vim"

--
Cole

vi *is* Vim.

 ls -l /usr/bin/vi
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 3 Apr 12 2008 /usr/bin/vi -> vim

If you have a *$HOME/.vimrc* file, Vim mode will automatically be enabled even if you specify *vi* to invoke your editor.

I was just looking for some sort of system wide, single file I could edit like rc.conf where I could set the editor env var to /usr/bin/emacs.

How about

/etc/profile # sh, bash, zsh
/etc/csh.login # csh, tcsh

This would handle all terminal sessions.

If for some reason you expect to be able to launch emacs from a GUI, then you can add environment variables to a GUI login session via

$HOME/.macosx/environment.plist

There is a nice free 3rd party System Preference (RCEnvironment) you can download and use for maintaining the environment.plist
<http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/15073>

This would make sure that your GUI login processes always had EDITOR=/usr/bin/emacs

If you have multiple GUI logins you would have to apply the environment.plist change to each account (which is different from the /etc/profile and /etc/csh.login which is global for all Terminal sessions).