File Creation and Editing
emacs | Text editor from Free Software Foundation |
vim | Text editor, extension of Unix |
umask | Set a default mode for new files and directories |
soffice | Office suite for editing Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents |
abiword | Edit Microsoft Word documents |
gnumeric | Edit Excel spreadsheets |
To get far with Linux, you must become proficient with one of its text editors. The two major ones are emacs from the Free Software Foundation, and vim, a successor to the Unix editor vi. Teaching these editors fully is beyond the scope of this book, but both have online tutorials, and we list common operations in Table 1-1. To edit a file, run either:
$ emacs myfile $ vim myfile
If myfile doesn’t exist, it is created automatically. You can also quickly create an empty file (for later editing) using the touch command (see File Properties):
$ touch newfile
or write data into a new file by redirecting the output of a program (see Input/output redirection):
$ echo anything at all > newfile
In case you share files with Microsoft Windows systems, we will also cover Linux programs that edit Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents.