Configured mc to use an external editor, set the EDITOR environment variable, pressed F4 to edit a file and... was presented with the midnight commander internal editor. I verified that the new config changes had been saved by quitting out of mc and relaunching and looking at the config. External editor is still selected but this setting is now ignored.
You can get rid of mcedit by installing mc with the "edit" USE flag being disabled. Would that be a feasible solution for you?
(In reply to Mark I Manning IV from comment #0) > Configured mc to use an external editor, set the EDITOR environment > variable, pressed F4 to edit a file and... was presented with the midnight > commander internal editor. > > I verified that the new config changes had been saved by quitting out of mc > and relaunching and looking at the config. External editor is still > selected but this setting is now ignored. I can't confirm the behaviour on my setup. Please show your: 1. emerge --info app-misc/mc 2. echo $EDITOR 3. grep internal_edit ~/.config/mc/ini