Linux Pocket Guide, 2nd Edition

File Creation and Editing

Command	Meaning
emacs	Text editor from Free Software Foundation.
vim	Text editor, extension of Unix vi.
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.

In case you share files with Microsoft Windows systems, we will also cover Linux programs that edit Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents.