You may want to use another editor that the one cvs starts by default when you type "cvs commit". If so, simply set the EDITOR environment variable to the name of the editor you want to use. Putting a setting such as this one in your ~/.bashrc would be a good idea:

export EDITOR=jpico

Alternatively, you can also specify a log message as a command line option so that cvs doesn't need to load up an editor in the first place:

# cvs commit -m 'I fixed a few silly bugs in portage.py'