timeout error message when running sudo visudo

Question

I was trying to install yabai on my Big Sur mac, and ran into an issue when trying to do visudo. After some playing around, I found that I was running into issues even with just sudo visudo (i.e., the problem isn't with yabai):

❯ sudo visudo
Timeout waiting for detached instance to start: No such file or directory
visudo: /etc/sudoers.tmp unchanged

Nor does adding an editor flag work:

❯ sudo EDITOR="vim" visudo
Timeout waiting for detached instance to start: No such file or directory
visudo: /etc/sudoers.tmp unchanged

❯ sudo EDITOR="nano" visudo
Timeout waiting for detached instance to start: No such file or directory
visudo: /etc/sudoers.tmp unchanged

I'm using zsh.

Would any of you happen to know how to get around this?

Thanks very much in advance!

Answer 1

It looks like visudo is trying to run Sublime Text despite your use of an EDITOR environment variable. I suspect that this is because you have it set in the SUDO_EDITOR or VISUAL environment variables, both of which take precedence over EDITOR if they're set. Try sudo SUDO_EDITOR="vim" visudo or sudo SUDO_EDITOR="nano" visudo instead.

If that isn't it, the other possibility is that in your sudoers file, env_editor is disabled and so editor is forcing the use of Sublime Text.