Editors are like religions, so at the risk of starting a holy war...
Vi and clones
By default (as of DebianPotato) the vi-clone installed is "nvi". This can be replaced by levee, which is a vi clone that offers a much smaller installation footprint and more economical resource usage, if required.
vim
You might prefer to install "["vim"]" as your vi-clone, or a different version of emacs, if that's what you're into.
If you install vim, an oft-overlooked package for people new to vim is vim-rt, the runtime files. They are necessary to do things like draw the menus, etc, in gvim and color your source code.
gvim
You can use the [wiki:GUI GUI] version gvim. To execute it, type
gvim
in a terminal.
Emacs
[:emacs:Emacs]. Some people think it is a mutated and bloated Lisp system trying to disguise itself as a text editor. However, today it is fast enough and once some commands have been learned it is quite powerful. Furthermore, there are auto-indent and syntax highlighting options for many file formats such as programming languages or ["LaTeX"], and config files such as ~/.muttrc and ~/.procmailrc. If you know Lisp, you can customize Emacs to any extent you like. I would advise to stick to verstion 20.x, since the 21.x -versions contain unneeded and annoying graphical "improvements" (on the other hand, there are ways to turn these "improvements" off; see "Notes"). In Debian, a version of ["emacs"] is installed by default.
Notes
Dump the stupid (non-traditional) icon bar: (tool-bar-mode nil)
Turn off the bleeping^Wblinking cursor: (blink-cursor-mode nil)
Wish list
For those who find vi cryptic and emacs ugly or confusing, there are a variety of alternatives. "jed" (or "xjed") is a full-featured emacs-like editor with colour support menus, etc. Note, the testing release is much improved over the version in potato.
gnotepad (command gnp).
gedit
mcedit
nano
ed
SciTE
Nano
- Nano is an easy to learn and use text file editor.
install:
aptitude install nano
- Practice using nano before you really need it.
you need command line interface [also called CLI ] to use nano. see CommandLineInterface
- to start nano enter: nano
- at bottom of screen are some common commands. '^' means press the control key.
- so ^W is the command to search. press control + W ....
- ^O to save the file
- ^X to exit
- ^G for help
- at bottom of screen are some common commands. '^' means press the control key.