I've been trying to find out how to change application executables (I don't know how to call them) so when you do vim file in the console it actually runs nano file.
I don't care if vim is installed or not on the operating system.
How can I achieve this?
With a symbolic link in /usr/local/bin. This works even after the installation of vim, because applications in /usr/local/bin have a higher priority per default PATH settings. To run the native vim installation you would have to run the full path /usr/bin/vim.
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/nano /usr/local/bin/vim
Check the symbolic link with
stat /usr/local/bin/vim
You should see something like this:
File: ‘/usr/local/bin/vim’ -> ‘/usr/bin/nano’
Size: 11 Blocks: 0 IO Block: 4096 symbolic link
Device: 801h/2049d Inode: 5377195 Links: 1
Access: (0777/lrwxrwxrwx) Uid: ( 0/ root) Gid: ( 0/ root)
Access: 2015-11-29 20:22:49.266067541 +0100
Modify: 2015-11-29 20:22:47.566056452 +0100
Change: 2015-11-29 20:22:47.566056452 +0100
Birth: -
