Text editors

Usage of editors 

It is very important to be able to use at least one text mode editor. Knowing how to use an editor on your system is the first step to independence.We will need to master an editor by the next chapter as we need it to edit files that influence our environment.As an advanced user, you may want to start writing scripts, or books, develop websites or new programs. Mastering an editor will immensely improve your productivity as well as your capabilities. Our focus is on text editors, which can also be used on systems without a graphical environment and in terminal windows. The additional advantage of mastering a text editor is in using it on remote machines.Since you don't need to transfer the entire graphical environment over the network, working with text editors tremendously improves network speed.There are, as usual, multiple ways to handle the problem. Let's see what editors are commonly available.

Emacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor, known on many UNIX and other systems. The text being edited is visible on the screen and is updated automatically as you type your commands. It is a real-time editor because the display is updated very frequently, usually after each character or pair of characters you type. This minimizes the amount of information you must keep in your head as you edit. Emacs is called advanced because it provides facilities that go beyond simple insertion and deletion: controlling subprocesses; automatic indentation of programs; viewing two or more files at once; editing formatted text; and dealing in terms  of characters, words, lines, sentences, paragraphs, and pages, as well as expressions and comments in several different programming languages.