On Linux: Week 4

John George Bauer-Buis

2018-03-11

NET-140-001N

Synopsis: Chapter 7 Viewing and Editing Files

Nano is a basic editor that can meet basic raw text editing needs. It’s not so good for dealing with fonts and things of that nature, not being a word processor. It has become my go-to editor for editing simple text files on *NIX systems from a CLI, in part due to its discoverability.

Vi and its successor, Vim, have three modes. On GNU systems, Vi is normally an alias of Vim, and redirects to it when it is run.
In Command Mode, Vim accepts commands from the user to do different things. There are quite a few different commands that can be input, and distinctly, there are multiple modes for commands.
In Insert Mode, the user can enter or delete text from a file. If the user is writing a document, they will spend a lot of time in this mode.
Line Mode is a more advanced command mode, (which it is sometimes called,) that offers additional features. Typing a colon (:) in Command Mode enters it.
Commands can be Repeated by using a number as a prefix, such as 5i to insert 5 lines.

Emacs is both a command-line and graphical editor, it can be used in either way.

Besides the graphical version of Emacs, there is also a graphical version of Vim, which is called gVim. Additionally, there also exist gedit, geany, and the well known word-processor LibreOffice, to name a few other programs with graphical text-editing capabilities. I have used geany on at least a few occasions, and have found it to not be resource-hungry, unlike some development tools and office suites.

Other Observations:

LibreOffice was developed from OpenOffice.

I may add to this post at a later date if I discover more useful information that I think I should feature here.

On Linux