Welcome to Creating and Editing Text Files.

After watching this video, you will be able to:

List popular text editors for Linux
Describe a popular GUI-based text editor
And use command-line editors to work with a file.
You use text editors to write code in your Linux environment.
There are many editors to choose from and they can be grouped into two main
categories:
Command-line text editors
And GUI text editors
Examples of command-line text editors are:
GNU nano, a small and friendly modeless text editor
vi, a traditional command-line editor originally created for Unix
And vim, a powerful mode-based command line-editor based on vi
A popular GUI-based editor is gedit, which is the default editor from the GNOME
environment.
And emacs (e’-max) is another text editor that is one of the oldest free, open
source
projects still under development.
You can use emacs in GUI mode or within a command line.
Gedit is a popular, modern text editor that comes preinstalled on most Linux
distros.
It’s designed as a general-purpose text editor and in keeping with the philosophy
of the GNOME project, it emphasizes simplicity and ease of use, with a clean and
simple GUI.
Gedit provides many features to enhance your text editing experience, including:
An integrated file browser
Undo and redo functionality
Search and replace functions with support for regular expressions in the search
string
And extensibility using plugins from the gedit-plugins package.
The text editor uses syntax color coding to help you interpret and focus on
different
aspects of your code.
GNU nano is a command-line text editor that provides:
Undo and redo features
Search and replace with support for regular expressions in the search string
Syntax highlighting
Automatic indentation of code
Line numbering
Line-by-line scrolling
And multiple buffers so you can work with many files at the same time
To open a text file in nano, type nano followed by the filename to open.
This opens a new text editor window in which you can edit the file.
Here is what the nano app looks like.
The main area displays the text of the open file, which in this case is the source
text
from the nano Wikipedia page.
The cursor is currently located at the beginning of the file, but you can navigate
within the
text using the arrow keys, page up and down keys, or ‘home’ and ‘end’ keys.
Any text you type is entered at the cursor.
You can also delete text using the Delete and Backspace keys.
Pressing Enter starts a new line.
At the bottom of the nano window there is a list of commands that you can use in
the
editor.
To access the commands, simultaneously press ‘control’ and the letter for the
command.
For example, to Get Help, press the ‘control’ and ‘G’ keys.
Let’s see how to use a few of the editing options.
To search for a text string, you can press ‘control W’ to use the ‘Where Is’
option.
This opens a new pane at the bottom of the app window.
Here’s a closer view of that new pane.
Within the square brackets you can see the most recently searched string, which
here
is 1999.
Type the string you want to find, for example ‘https’, and press Enter.
The cursor moves to the first instance of the search string it finds after the
current
position of the cursor, here.
Nano supports many other editing features which you will explore in one of the labs
for this course.
Vim is a traditional and very powerful command-line editor.
It takes some time to get accustomed to how it works, but with some practice your
fingers
will develop the muscle memory to accomplish all of your text editing tasks at
speed.
Entering vim at the command prompt opens the vim app
You can also specify a filename to edit a new or existing file.
Vim has two basic modes: Insert mode, where you enter text, and Command mode, where
you
do everything else.
After you start a vim session,
press i to enter Insert mode.
Type some text, for example “some text,”
and press the Escape key to exit Insert mode and switch to Command mode.
And the text is written to the buffer at the current cursor location.
Now you are back in Command mode, and you can save your file with a filename using
the
‘colon save’ command along with a filename, such as ‘example dot txt’.
The buffer is written to the file and a message is displayed, showing the filename,
that it
is a new file, it has one line with 10 columns, and that it was successfully
written.
Now that your file already exists, you can use the more common ‘colon w’ command
to write any changes to the file.
To quit your vim session, enter ‘colon q’.
And to quit and discard any changes made since the last write operation, include
the ‘bang,’
or exclamation mark, as in ‘colon q bang’.
This was a very short introduction to vim.
There are many commands that you can use to navigate the text buffer and perform
operations
such as searching, copying, pasting, and moving text around.
You’ll get to practice some of these commands in an upcoming lab.
In this video, you learned that:
You can use a variety of command-line or GUI-based text editors to work with your
Linux code.
gedit is a GUI-based editor that provides many features to simplify your work.
GNU nano is a command-line editor that provides similar functionality in a command-
line format.
And vim is another command-line editor that uses Insert mode to enter data and
Command
mode to work with the file.
So, you’ve seen how to use a text editor to work with existing files.
This will be helpful as you learn how to use Linux commands to create files and
append
text to them.