Another ”wee” tip. I had a hard time doing this right…
Put emacs in the EDITOR shell variable:
$ EDITOR=emacs
$ export EDITOR
and add the following to your ~/.emacs:
(set 'temporary-file-directory "/tmp")
Now, edit the crontab file via:
$ crontab -e
Edit and save the file, and you should get a response from crontab:
crontab: installing new crontab
If you get an error message, something is wrong. You can check that your edits really changed your crontab using:
$ crontab -l