SAMS Teach Yourself Red Hat® Fedora™ 4 Linux® All in One

Using Common Command-Line Editors

In the preceding chapter, you created a few text files using the touch command, but they were all empty text files—unlikely to be of much use for any common purpose. Most of the time if you're creating a text file, you need it to contain specific text that you enter yourself.

At the Linux command line, two major editors are commonly used to create text files—and they are polar opposites. The first is a small, classic Unix tool called vi; the second is a large, extensible data processor called emacs. You can use either editor to create the kinds of documents you want to create at the Linux command line. The vi editor is generally preferred by users who want a minimal, fast, no-frills editing experience, and the ...