Each works well with your favorite text editor. It is important that there is a default editor known. In debian and in other linux distro, default editor is vi.

You could change default editor:

  1. during distro installation
  2. custom each user into .bashrc or .profile file with line:

    export EDITOR=/usr/bin/emacs

  3. custom locally in a shell session and/or particular program:

    env EDITOR=nano crontab -e