CSC373/406: linux: Unix text editors [27/42]

To edit your programs, you will need a text editor.

nano is the easiest to use.

Having said that, the most popular editors in UNIX/Linux are vim and emacs. You can learn about vi at

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/UnixAndC/Editors/ViIntro.html

and emacs at

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/UnixAndC/Editors/Emacs.html

Here is a short primer on emacs. To start emacs type

$emacs

To open a file file.c using emacs, type

$emacs file.c

You can start editing know. When you want to save your file, type

Ctrl-X Ctrl-S (This means pressing the Ctrl key and pressing x and then s, while still pressing the Ctrl key)

To save a file under a different name, type

Ctrl-X Ctrl-W

To exit emacs, type

Ctrl-X Ctrl-C

Here is a short list of important emacs editing commands

To move the cursor forward or backward, type

Ctrl-F or Ctrl-B

respectively.To move the cursor up or down, type

Ctrl-P and Ctrl-N

respectively. To delete a character pointed to by the cursor, type

Ctrl-D

To cut and paste, move the cursor to the first character of the part you want to cut and paste. Then type

Ctrl-SPACE (SPACE is the space bar)

Then move the cursor down to the last character of the part you want to cut. Then type

Ctrl-W

to cut the text. You can then move the cursor to the position where you want to paste, and type

Ctrl-Y

to paste. You can paste the cut text again and again with Ctrl-Y.

You should be able to modify the properties of the VT102 terminal emulator in SSH to customize some of teh key bindings.

For additional info about UNIX/Linux go to Norman Matloff's intro to Unix