Text Editors
Inevitably with a shell account, you are going to need to edit text in files. There are numerous text editors available on SDF. Here is a list of text editors available on SDF
As you can see, there are quite a few to choose from. Some are simple, and some are complex and quite amazingly powerful. Many folks find pico or the similar nano (also see SDF wiki page nano) convenient and easy to use. There are also friendly alternatives such as micro, which works more like Windows Notepad or IOS TextEdit. And for those who are willing to learn them there are much more powerful editors like “vi”, “vim” and "emacs" which offer an unmatched degree of customization. What is important is to choose an editor that you are comfortable working with, as you will be spending considerable time using it.
To restate and distill the above, the mainstream editors in unix, and thus on SDF, are in the following separate families, with an indication of the most modern flavor which one you should use, ignoring all the weight of unix history:
| Family | Description | Use this modern one |
|---|---|---|
| emacs | the does-it-all-and-more emacs, along with a 'micro emacs' version, mg the 'micro gnu emacs' | emacs |
| pico | original, easiest to use, with onscreen help pico, superceded by flavors nano with many more features, and micro a re-imagining that behaves more like a UI desktop editor (ctl-x,ctl-c, ctl-v for cut,copy, paste) | micro |
| vi | original and powerful modal editor vi, superceded by flavors vim “vi improved”, and elvis, among others. You can run vimtutor at the command line to learn how to use this. | vim |