Editing Text Files

Steven J Zeil

Old Dominion University Dept. of Computer Science

May. 26, 2006

An editor is a program that allows you to easily create and alter text files. There are a variety of editors on the system, of which the most popular are vi and emacs. Neither is exactly the easiest thing in the world to learn to use. I suggest learning emacs, because

As you gain more facility with emacs and with Unix in general, you will find that emacs offers many advanced facilities for doing specific tasks.
In particular, emacs offers a number of aids for programmers, including syntax-based highlighting of different programming languages (using different colors/fonts for reserved words, comments, strings, etc.), commands for checking matching {}, for compiling programs and collecting the error messages, and for stepping through those error messages, and for debugging the compiled code.
emacs is widely available (for free) for all Unix systems and also for MS Windows.

To run emacs, make sure that you have correctly identified your terminal kind. Then give the command1

If you are using PuTTY as your telnet/ssh client and you are not running an X server, then you should invoke emacs like this:

emacs -nw

When you are done with the tutorial, here are few extra things you should know about emacs: