Editing in text editors

One common complaint among new Linux users is that vi or other text editors are too hard to use. That may be true, but they aren't the only available editors.

Experts used to tell new users to learn ed or vi and that they would not regret it. It was true in the past, but it is no longer necessary to learn hard to use editors to do powerful text editing.

Graphical editors most likely came with your distribution. You may not have installed them, but they are on your CD-ROM. Some exemples are pico, a console full screen text editor, and emacs, which work on console and X Window, and is a very powerful text editor.

Desktop interfaces such as GNOME an KDE each come with their own text editors too. You can even find more editors on the Web.