Linux Console Text Editors

ed

An editor for UNIX written in PDP-11/20 assembler in 1971 by Ken Thompson. Now there is GUN-ed for Linux. ed is a line-oriented text editor. It is used to create, display, modify and otherwise manipulate text files. red is a restricted ed: it can only edit files in the current directory and cannot execute shell commands.

elvis

A clone of the vi editor written by Steve Kirkendall and distributed under the Clarified Artistic License. Elvis is the version of vi that comes with Slackware, Frugalware, KateOS, and MINIX 3. Elvis recognizes binary files, as well and provides a split screen for editing them.

emacs

Emacs is, like vim, an extremely full-featured editor found on most UNIX- based systems. In addition to its editing capabilities, Emacs is extremely customizable, with additional functionality available in modules that let the Emacs interface do much more than just text editing. It’s relatively easy to do basic editing with, and has an incredible depth of functionality for the dedicated user to explore. Like vim, Emacs uses keystroke combinations to access its many different functional behaviors. These require memorization to be most useful, so Emacs is most useful for people who use the command line very often.

jed

Menu driven editor for text terminal. JED runs on Windows, MS-DOS, and all flavors on Linux and Unix. JED is considered a replacement for Emacs, as JED is smaller and faster.

joe

Keyboard shortcut based text editor.

nano

nano is a simple command-line based editor. It’s a replacement for the pico editor, so instructions for using the pico editor can be used with nano. If you invoke the pico editor, you actually run nano. Nano is a good introduction to using a command-line based editor as it includes easy-to-follow on-screen help.

nvi

nvi (new vi) is a re-implementation of vi. nvi was written by Keith Bostic and currently seems to be frozen at version 1.79. It is the default vi on all BSD systems (NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD) as well as MINIX. BSD projects continue to use nvi version 1.79 due to licensing differences between Berkeley Database 1.85 and the later versions by Sleepycat Software. nvi is unusual because it uses a database to store the text as it is being edited. nvi is only available on POSIX/Unix platforms due to its reliance on the curses/ncurses library.

pico

The Pine Composer, or pico for short, is a simple display-oriented text editor based on the Pine message system composer. It was developed by the University of Washington and is part of the Pine Email Package. Pico uses keyboard commands and lists available commands at the bottom of the screen. Because pico is not open source, a clone of pico called nano has been created and distributed with many popular linux distributions.

vi

vi is always available whatever Linux distribution you have.

vim

vim is a vi-compatible text editor. It has many powerful enhancements for moving around, searching, and editing documents. Basic editing is simple to learn and there is much additional functionality to explore. Most functionality is accessed by typing combinations of keystrokes that trigger certain behavior. Vim, or the editor it’s modeled after, vi, is found in most UNIX-based operating systems. If you’ll be doing lots of editing from the command line, it’s a good editor to learn to use, but if you only use a command-line based editor occasionally, you can get by without learning it.