Summary

In this lesson, you were introduced to the two most popular text editors on the Unix platform: vi and emacs. Hopefully this chapter has motivated you to get a book on each one and delve deeper. Remember, editing files will be something you do often in the Unix environment, so it's important to know how to use at least one editor. In this lesson we introduced you to three of them; the vi editor, the emacs editor and the GUI-based editor. As long as you have the basics, you can grow from there.

Remember also that it is best to learn by doing, and this lesson provided you with the tools necessary to do the three most important tasks in a text editor:

• Starting the editor of your choosing

• Editing text

• Exiting and saving your work

Because you know how to quit both vi and emacs without saving, don't be afraid to experiment and make sure you spend some time on a practice system or practice lab working on these lessons until you have them mastered. Let's review before moving on to the next lesson, where we will learn about file-editing tools that add more functionality to your Unix skills toolkit.

• vi editor This editor is fast and convenient for making small changes to files. It has a user interface that might be called nonintuitive at the kindest. The omnipresence of the vi editor, its speed of execution, and its small disk-space requirements make it a convenient choice for fast editsand for when you're working at an unfamiliar machine.

• Esc: This gets you out of vi in a hurry, without saving any changes you've made.

• emacs editor The emacs editor contains everything you need in an editor, and then some, and then some more. On older hardware, emacs was very slow to start and respond, but today's fast machines and extremely inexpensive disk space and memory have largely mitigated this. Take the emacs tutorial, dig around in its info files, and find a book on emacs to read if you want to get the most out of this editor.

• Ctrl+x Ctrl+c Followed by answering Yes to any "quit anyway?" questions, these keys get you out of emacs in a hurry, and without saving any changes you've made.