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In our world, people get into conflicts about all sorts of matters, from religion and belief through to money and oil. And, in the Linux world, tensions can build up and overspill into flame wars on many subjects too. The most popular of these is text editors.
The focus of this 10 page mini-course is to provide a foundation for using basic text editors. At some time everyone who uses Linux will need a text editor. One of the most important reasons for learning vi is that it is loaded on every Linux distro by default whereas others like nano or emacs are not. So whatever text editor you choose be sure you load it and use it before you need it.
I spent the last few days reading The Craft of Text Editing, a book on the design of text editors.It focuses mainly on editors based on Emacs, but many of the principles apply to all other text editors [...] Since most people spend a large portion of their time inside of their text editor, I believe it is important to understand the basic
A text editor is a type of program used for editing plain text files. Text editors are often provided with operating systems or software development packages, and can be used to change configuration files and programming language source code.
It's no longer a hard-copy world, and most writing tasks don't require all the bells and whistles in heavyweight word processing programs. Text editors are a much more nimble choice. However, not all text editors are alike.
In this group test Mayank Sharma of Linux Voices looks at five humble text editors that are more than capable of heavy-lifting texting duties. They can highlight syntax and auto-indent code just as effortlessly as they can spellcheck documents. You can use them to record macros and manage code snippets just as easily as you can copy/paste plain text.
"...This thesis is intended to answer the question «What are the important considerations in designing a text editor?» In answering this question, it will provide a reference document for would-be implementors of text editors..." -- http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/15905/2/08327312-MIT.pdf
In 1976 one man changed the face of text editors. That man is Bill Joy who developed vi for BSD UNIX. To those who are a bit unfamiliar with command line UNIX/Linux, vi (short for Visual) is a screen-oriented text editor that operates in two modes: insert mode and normal mode. Please reference here for a deeper explanation of its design and implementation.
One of the tools I needed was a text editor, because, let's face it, with a "mini computer" in your pocket you'll need a way of creating and editing text files. After testing several text editors I found that Text Edit was the best.