editor-support.md

title	Editor support
description	How lazyagent picks an editor when you open a session's working directory.
sidebar	order 1

Pressing o in the Terminal UI or clicking Open in the macOS GUI opens the selected session's CWD in your editor. The resolution order is:

1. Cursor-specific shortcut — if the selected session is a Cursor session and the cursor CLI is installed, it opens in Cursor IDE directly. If cursor is missing, the standard flow below is used.
2. $VISUAL / $EDITOR — picked based on what's set, with a TUI popup when both are defined.
3. Hint — if neither is set, lazyagent shows a short message pointing at how to configure them.

Resolution table

Configuration	Behavior
Both $VISUAL and $EDITOR set	Picker popup asks which one to use (TUI only; GUI defaults to $VISUAL)
Only $VISUAL set	Opens as GUI editor
Only $EDITOR set	Opens as TUI editor (suspends the TUI while the editor runs)
Neither set	Hint on how to configure them

Recommended setup

Add to your shell rc file:

# ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc
export VISUAL="code"   # GUI editor: VS Code, Cursor, Zed, …
export EDITOR="nvim"   # TUI editor: vim, nvim, nano, …

With both set, the TUI will ask which to use each time — useful for switching between a GUI quick-jump and a full terminal session.

Config override

You can force a specific editor via editor in config.json:

{ "editor": "code" }

When set, this overrides $VISUAL / $EDITOR for all open actions.