Chapter 4. Edit Files

This chapter is about creating and editing text files using the Unix text editors supplied with Mac OS X. It also takes a quick look at some graphical-based text editors. The seven projects cover the following topics:

nano: a simple text editor that's easy to use and sufficiently full featured to use as your everyday editor.

emacs: a big, fat, full-featured text editor that'll do all you want and more besides. It includes an extensive interactive help system and tutorials, making it easy to pick up the basics.

vim: a programmer's editor with syntax highlighting and a programmatic approach to forming edit commands. Like emacs, it has an extensive online help system. vim is upward-compatible with the older vi (pronounced vee eye) editor.

Graphical-based text editors such as Apple's TextEdit and the freeware editor TextWrangler, from Bare Bones Software.

These projects help you get up to speed using the three main Unix text editors supplied with Mac OS X: nano, emacs, and vim. The vim editor is covered in greatest detail because it's the toughest to learnbut also the most rewarding if you can learn to think in a vim-like way. Project 36 discusses OS X-native text editors. Chapter 7 offers some techniques for editing files programmatically by using commands such as sed and awk.