Text-Editors

• vi (Vim)
  

  Even though Vi, man-page (or its enhanced version Vim) is somewhat awkward to use at first, it enables fast, simple, and effective editing once you get the hang of it. A key concept in Vi is combining a certain action (delete, copy to buffer, capitalize, etc.) with a movement (go to line 25, go to end of document, go to next occurrence of “foo,” go to 2ND occurrence of character “x” in this line, etc.). The action is performed on all lines or characters between the current cursor position and the destination cursor position. Vi is extremely powerful in moving around within (or between) files—Vim in particular is excellent. You can jump to a specific line, to the line where you were before jumping to the current line, to the line in the middle of the screen, to the line where you just changed “foo” into “bar,” etc. You'll never have to mess with arrow keys to move around within a file. VIM is an improved version of the editor "vi", one of the standard text editors on UNIX systems.

  For more information on Vi commands see section:§9.7.1.

• Emacs
  

  To quote the emacs, man-page manual: Emacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor. If this seems to be a bit of a mouthful, an easier explanation is Emacs is a text editor and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp (“elisp”, for short), a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. Some of the features of GNU Emacs include:

  • Content sensitive major modes for a wide variety of file types, from plain text to source code to HTML files.
  • Complete online documentation, including a tutorial for new users.
  • Highly extensible through the Emacs Lisp language.
  • Support for many languages and their scripts, including all the European “Latin” scripts, Russian, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Lao, Ethiopian, and some Indian scripts.
  • A large number of extensions which add other functionality. The GNU Emacs distribution includes many extensions; many others are available separately–even a web browser.

  Emacs is the editor of choice of many developers, and even is used for word processing and email. Yo can even compile and debug inside Emacs.

• XEmacs
  XEmacs, man-page is a highly customizable text editor and application development system. Learning XEmacs is a lifelong activity and even people who have used Emacs for years keep discovering new features. You should be able to start Xemacs by typing xemacs on the command shell. Almost all features of Emacs are supported in XEmacs (the ones that aren't supported are generally implemented in a better way in XEmacs). XEmacs has an extensive interactive help facility, but assumes that you know how to manipulate XEmacs windows and buffers. CTRL-h enters the Help facility. Help Tutorial (CTRL-h t) requests an interactive tutorial which can teach beginners the fundamentals of XEmacs in a few minutes. Help Apropos (CTRL-h a) helps you find a command given its functionality, Help Key Binding (CTRL-h k) describes a given key sequence's effect, and Help Func­ tion (CTRL-h f) describes a given Lisp function specified by name. All of these help functions, and more, are available on the Help menu if you are using a window system.

  One of the interesting features that makes XEmacs useful at ccrma is that it can run lisp as a sub-process in one of the buffers so that all emacs editing commands can be applied to the lisp expressions you are evaluating. For this (and other features) to work you need to have the proper incantations in a file in your home directory called ".emacs". This file takes care of initializing things properly for all supported programming, typing or text modes.

• gedit
  

  If Vi or Emacs seem not too friendly, you might try Gedit.

  gedit is a full-featured text editor for the GNOME desktop environment. You can use it to prepare simple notes and documents, or you can use some of its advanced features, making it your own software development environment.
  

  gedit is written in C and Python and built on the GTK+ toolkit. It is part of the core application suite of GNOME. It has syntax-highlighting for a wide variety of different programming languages (such as C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, etc.)
  

  Some among others features include:

  1. Print and print preview support
  2. Clipboard support (cut/copy/paste)
  3. Go to specific line
  4. Auto indentation
  5. Bracket matching
  6. Full support for internationalized text (UTF-8)
  7. Text wrapping
  8. Line numbers

• gnotepad Please see the word processing section§9.6.