On Dec 6, 2003, at 11:09 PM, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:

> You don't have to use "vi" with visudo.
>
> You can set EDITOR or VISUAL environment variables to point to the 
> editor
> you want to use. visudo will honor that.

It depends:
"However, if visudo is configured with the --with-enveditor flag or the 
enveditor Default variable is set in sudoers, visudo will use any the 
editor defines by EDITOR or VISUAL.  Note that this can be a security 
hole since it allows the user to execute any program they wish simply 
by setting EDITOR or VISUAL."

I keep EDITOR set to "emacs" and I've seen different behaviors from 
visudo on different systems.

Note: the above quote is from a BSD man page. I'm not at my Linux 
computer at the  moment.