Text editor recommendations

[Avi Greenbury]

On Wed, 21 Oct 2009 07:05:50 +0000
madanabhat27 at gmail.com wrote:

> Hi all,
> I was wondering which is the text editor you'd recommend for me,
> considering that I'm a TOTAL newbie to linux 

On the terminal, nano or pico (one being a clone of the other).
They're lightweight, simple, and most importantly _always_ display the
key combinations for the most often-needed actions (Help, Save, Open,
Exit etc.). I've given this recommendation to a few people on
migrating to linux, and none have (claimed to have) found it
particularly complex.

As far as gui editors are concerned, I've no idea. I tend to use
whatever's default since there's not a huge amount to go wrong -
there's no commands to remember, and everything's normally in a menu.

The more complicated text editors are complicated for a reason other
than pure masochism (except emacs ;) ) - they're more featureful and
productivity is quicker. They do tend to subscribe to the unix
philosophy that a steep learning curve that plateaus is
significantly more efficient than a shallow learning curve of constant
gradient. You will keep running into this philosophy and it, amongst
others, is incredibly likely to get in the way a lot until at some
point you decide you actually quite like it.

For some reference, if you do find yourself in Vim:

There are three modes - Insert, Replace and Command. Hitting 'esc'
three times will *always* get you into command mode (once is often
enough). Pressing 'insert' will enter insert from command, and then
toggle between insert and replace.
Commands start with a colon (:), and each command is (generally) a
letter long, but can be concatenated. Handy ones are:
:q	quit. Will prompt if file's unsaved
:w	save (write) file.
:wq	save (write) and quit
:q!	quit without writing

--
Avi Greenbury
http://aviswebsite.co.uk ;)
http://aviswebsite.co.uk/asking-questions