April 2011
Intermediate to advanced
840 pages
18h 7m
English
Chapter 9
Working with Editors
In This Chapter
- Working with the vim editor
- Understanding emacs
- Getting comfortable with KDE
- Using the GNOME editor
Before you can start your shell scripting career, you'll need to know how to use at least one text editor in Linux. The more you know about how to use these fancy features such as searching, cutting, and pasting, the quicker you'll be able to develop your shell scripts. This chapter discusses the main text editors you'll see in the Linux world.
The vim Editor
If you're working in command line mode, you may want to become familiar with at least one text editor that operates in the Linux console. The vi editor is the original editor used on Unix systems. It uses the console graphics mode to emulate a text-editing window, allowing you to see the lines of your file, move around within the file, and insert, edit, and replace text.
While it is quite possibly the most complicated editor in the world (at least in the opinion of those who hate it), it provides many features that have made it a staple for Unix administrators for decades.
When the GNU Project ported the vi editor to the open source world, they chose to make some improvements to it. Because it no longer resembled the original vi editor found in the Unix world, the developers also renamed it, to vi improved, or vim.
To make life easier, almost all Linux distributions create an alias named (see Chapter 5) vi that points to the vim program:
$ alias vi
alias vi=‘vim’
$
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