Editors

Unix text editors

• sEdit -- A very simple point and click editor for our Unix workstations. Useful for people with no prior Unix experience. Invoke by typing sEdit on the command line (the 'E' is a capital letter).

• pico -- Pico is a simple, menu driven ASCII text editor. It is mostly self explanatory, and it has a reasonable online help system. Invoke by typing pico on the command line.

• xedit -- If you are using the X environment, you have xedit available to you. This is a very simple point and click editor, but it is functional. It is also mostly self explanatory by virtue of being too simple to need explanation. If you are curious, consult the man page for more details.

• vi -- The original visual unix text editor, vi is nearly universal in the unix world, which is one of its advantages. It is a powerful, command based editor, which runs in a terminal window. It's main disadvantage is that it is often unintuitive, and therefore difficult to learn.

  An excellent (and brief) introduction to vi is:

  • Editing with vi by Kate Lance and Kevin Wallace

• emacs -- Emacs is the Gnu editor. Emacs is unquestionably the most powerful editor around. It runs in a terminal window (emacs), under X (xemacs), and under Next step (Emacs.app in /LocalApps). The X and Next versions have pulldown menus and point and click functionality. Also, on some machines, the default is version 18. To force version 19, use emacs19 and xemacs19.

  To get started with emacs, try:

  • the emacs tutorial (Ctrl-H t from the welcome screen)
  • the online documentation system (info from the command line, or Ctrl-H i within emacs.)
  • the print version of the emacs manual in the Center library (see map).

  One last thing. Because of the multi-architecture environment, hardcore emacs users will want to "fix" the backspace and arrow keys so that they do the right thing on any system. Add the following lines to your .emacs file.

  ;;; key bindings
  
  (define-key isearch-mode-map [backspace] 'isearch-delete-char)
  (define-key isearch-mode-map "\C-h" 'isearch-delete-char)
  (global-set-key "\C-h" 'backward-delete-char-untabify)
  (global-set-key "\M-\C-h" 'backward-delete-char)
  (global-set-key "\M-[220z" 'backward-char)
  (global-set-key "\M-[222z" 'forward-char)
  (global-set-key "\M-[218z" 'previous-line)
  (global-set-key [backspace] 'backward-delete-char-untabify)
  (global-set-key [C-backspace] 'backward-delete-char-untabify)
  (global-set-key [S-backspace] 'backward-delete-char-untabify)
  

SGI editors

• jot -- jot is a very simple point and click ASCII text editor. It's functionality is limited, but using it is a snap. Start it from the command line, or by clicking on its icon in the workspace.

• Zip -- Zip is also a point and click editor, but with substantially more capabilities than jot. Start Zip from the command line, and note the capitol Z.

NeXT editors

• Edit -- Edit.app is the NeXT point and click ASCII editor. It is simple, but fairly limited. It lives in /NextApps

• WriteNow -- WriteNow.app is actually a word processing program. It is in the mid-range of editing capability. Among its strengths are its ability to edit and convert Rich Text Format documents, and its easy wysiwyg formatting for memos, etc. WriteNow.app is in /LocalApps.

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Comments to: webmaster@www.geom.uiuc.edu
Created: Fri Sep 8 11:39:00 1995 --- Last modified: Jun 18 1996