Unix Third Edition: Visual Quickstart Guide

Choosing an Editor

Basically, all editors are designed to do the same things: enable you to create, modify, and save text files. These files could include configuration files, email messages, or shell scripts—essentially any text file you can create. Exactly which editor you choose is up to you, depending on your specific needs and how much you’re willing to learn.

In this book, we’ll stick to three biggies—pico, vi, and emacs—which will likely give you all the capabilities you’ll need. We chose these because pico is (arguably) the easiest Unix editor to use, vi is one of the most powerful and is available on almost every Unix system, and emacs provides an unbelievable number of options and is a handy tool for the up-and-coming Unix pro to have. ...