Text editors

In this section, we will cover and:

1. Understand the role of text editors: Recognize the importance of text editors in the command-line environment for saving commands, writing scripts, and editing configuration files.
2. Differentiate between text editors: Identify key differences between line editors like ed and visual editors like vim, nano, micro, and tilde.
3. Operate a line editor: Use basic commands in ed, such as addressing lines, manipulating text, and editing files.
4. Explore the functionality of vim: Understand the basic modal operation of vim, including command mode, insert mode, and how to integrate shell commands within the editor.
5. Utilize beginner-friendly editors: Comfortably use nano, micro, tilde, and edit for straightforward text editing tasks, taking advantage of their user-friendly key bindings and interfaces.
6. Appreciate historical context: Recognize the historical significance of ed and vim and how their development has influenced modern computing practices.

Getting Started

Working on the command line means writing a lot of commands. There will be times when we want to save some of the commands that we write in order to re-use them later. Or, we might want to develop the commands into a script (i.e., a program) because we want to automate a process. The shell is great for writing one off commands, so-called one-liners, but it's not a great place to write multi-line or very long commands. Therefore it can be helpful to write and save our commands in a text editor.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the shell that we are working with is called bash, and bash is a full-fledged programming language. That means that when we write a simple command, like cd public_html, we are programming. It makes sense that the more programming that we do, the better we'll get at it. This requires more sophisticated environments to help manage our programs than the command line prompt can provide. Text editors fulfill that role.

As we learn more about how to do systems administration with Linux, we will need to edit configuration files, too. Most configuration files exist in the /etc directory. For example, later in the semester we will install the Apache Web Server, and we will need to edit Apache's configuration files in the process. We could do this using some of the tools that we've already covered, like sed and awk, but it'll make our lives much easier to use a text editor.

In any case, in order to save our commands or edit text files, a text editor is very helpful. Programmers use text editors to write programs, but programmers often work in graphical user environments, so they often use GUI text editors or IDEs. As systems administrators, it would be unusual to have a graphical user interface installed on a server. The servers that we manage contain limited or specific software that serves the server's main purpose. Additional software on a server that is not relevant to its main function only takes up extra disk space, consumes valuable computing resources, and poses an additional security footprint.

In this lesson, we'll learn about several text editors: ed, vim, nano, micro, tilde, and edit. We cover ed primarily for its historical importance, and its descendant, vim, which is a powerful editor that is widely used today, but these editors have high learning curves. emacs is another common text editor that can be used on the command line, but it also has a learning curve, and I am not covering it here. For simplicity, I will encourage you to use nano, micro, tilde, or edit, but if you continue to use the command line, you should learn more advanced editors like vim or emacs.

ed

ed is a line editor that is installed by default on many Linux distributions. Ken Thompson created ed in the late 1960s to write the original Unix operating system. It was used without computer monitors because those were still uncommon, and instead for teletypewriters (TTYs) and printers. The lack of a visual display, like a monitor, is the reason that ed was written as a line editor. If you visit that second link, you will see the terminal interface from those earlier days. It is the same basic interface you are using now when you use your terminal applications, which are virtualized versions of those old teletypewriters. I think this is a testament of the power of the terminal: that advanced computer users still use the same basic technology today.

In practice, when we use a line editor like ed, the main process of entering text is like any other editor. The big difference is when we need to manipulate text. In a graphical text editor, if we want to delete a word or edit some text, we might backspace over the text or highlight a word and delete it. In a line editor, we manipulate text by referring to lines or across multiple lines and then run commands on the text in those line(s). This is process we followed when we covered grep, sed, and awk, and especially sed, and it should not surprise you that these are related to ed.

To operationalize this, like in sed, each line has an address. The address for line 7 is 7, and so forth. Line editors like ed are command driven. There is no menu to select from at the top of the window. In fact, when we used ed to open an existing file, the text in the file isn't even printed on the screen. If a user wants to delete a word, or print (to screen) some text, the user has to command the line editor to print the relevant line. We do this by specifying the line's address and issuing a command to delete the word on that line, or print the line. Line editors also work on ranges of line, including all the lines in the file, just like sed does.

Many of the commands that ed uses are also used by sed, since sed is based on ed. The following table compares commands between these two programs:

However, there are big differences that mainly relate to the fact that ed is a text editor and sed is not (really). For example, here are some commands that mostly make sense in ed as a text editor. sed can do some of these tasks, where it makes sense (e.g., we don't quit sed), but sometimes in a non-trivial way.

There are other differences, but these are sufficient for our purposes.

Let's see how to use ed to open a file, and print the content without (1,$p) and with (1,$n) line numbers.

ed operating-systems.csv
183
1,$p
OS, License, Year
Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009
FreeBSD, BSD, 1993
Linux, GPL, 1991
iOS, Proprietary, 2007
macOS, Proprietary, 2001
Windows NT, Proprietary, 1993
Android, Apache, 2008
1,$n
1 OS, License, Year
2 Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009
3	FreeBSD, BSD, 1993
4	Linux, GPL, 1991
5	iOS, Proprietary, 2007
6	macOS, Proprietary, 2001
7	Windows NT, Proprietary, 1993
8	Android, Apache, 2008

Using ed, we can remove the header line of the operating-systems.csv file by specifying the line number (1), and issuing the delete command (d), just like in sed. This becomes a permanent change if I save the file with the w (write) command:

1d
1,$p
Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009
FreeBSD, BSD, 1993
Linux, GPL, 1991
iOS, Proprietary, 2007
macOS, Proprietary, 2001
Windows NT, Proprietary, 1993
Android, Apache, 2008

To refer to line ranges, I add a comma between addresses. Therefore, to delete lines 1, 2, and 3, and then quit without saving:

1,3d
,p
iOS, Proprietary, 2007
macOS, Proprietary, 2001
Windows NT, Proprietary, 1993
Android, Apache, 2008
Q

Note that with sed, in order to make a change in-place, we need to use the -i option. But with ed, we save changes with the w (write) command.

ed operating-systems.csv
183
1,3d
,p
iOS, Proprietary, 2007
macOS, Proprietary, 2001
Windows NT, Proprietary, 1993
Android, Apache, 2008
w

I can use ed to find and replace strings. The syntax is the same as it is in sed. I'll start with a fresh version of the file:

1,$s/Linux/GNU\/Linux/

If we want to add new rows to the file, we can append a or insert i text after or at specific lines. To append text after line 3, use a. We enter a period on a newline to leave input mode and return to command mode:

3a
FreeDOS, GPL, 1998
.

Because we enter input mode when using the a, i, or c commands, we enter a period . on a line by itself to revert to command mode.

To insert at line 2, use i:

2i
CP/M, Proprietary, 1974
.

Like sed, we can also find and replace using regular expressions instead of line numbers. I start a new ed session to reload the file to start fresh:

ed operating-systems.csv
183
/Linux/s/Linux/GNU\/Linux/

Of course, ed can be used to write and not simply edit files. Let's start fresh. In the following session, I'll start ed, enter append mode a, write a short letter, exit append mode ., name the file f, write w (save) the file, and quit q:

ed
a
Dear Students,

I hope you find this really interesting.
Feel free to practice and play on the command line,
as well as use tools like ed, the standard editor.

Sincerely,
Dr. Burns
.
f letter.txt
w
q

It's good to know something about ed for historical reasons and because the line editing technology developed for it is still in use today, as seen with commands like grep and sed. It is also a basic part of the design of the vim text editor.

vim

The vim text editor is a descendant of ed. Generally, we started with ed, which influenced the creation of vi, which led eventually to vim, aka, Vi IMproved. The original vi text editor was recreated and is available as the nvi editor. Due to this genealogy, vim uses many of the same commands as ed does when vim is in command mode. Like ed, we can start vim at the bash prompt with or without a file name. Here I open the letter.txt file with vim. The default mode is command mode:

vim letter.txt
Dear Students,

I hope you find this really interesting.
Feel free to practice and play on the command line,
as well as use tools like ed, the standard editor.

Sincerely,
Dr. Burns

To enter insert mode, I can type i or a for insert or append mode. There isn't any difference on an empty file, but on a file that has text, i will start insert mode before the cursor position, and a will insert mode after the cursor position. Once in insert mode, you can type text as you normally would and use the arrow keys to navigate around the file.

To return to command mode in vim, you press the Esc key. And then you can enter commands like you would with ed, using the same syntax.

Unlike ed, when in command mode, the commands we type are not placed wherever the cursor is, but at the bottom of the screen. Let's first turn on line numbers to know which address is which, and then we'll replace ed with Ed. Note that I precede these commands with a colon:

:set number
:5s/ed/Ed/

One of the more powerful things about both ed and vim is that I can call bash shell commands from the editors. Let's say that I want to add the date to my letter file. To do that, Linux has a command called date that will return today's date and time. To call the date command within vim and insert the output into the file: I press Esc to enter command mode (if I'm not already in it), enter a colon, type r for the read into buffer command, then enter the shell escape command, which is an exclamation point !, and then the bash shell date command:

:r !date
Dear Students,

I hope you find this really interesting.
Feel free to practice and play on the command line,
as well as use tools like ed, the standard editor.
Thu Jun 30 02:44:08 PM EDT 2022

Sincerely,
Dr. Burns

Since the last edit I made was to replace ed with Ed, vim entered the date after that line, which is line 6. To move that date line to the top of the letter, I can use the move m command and move it to line 0, which is the top of the file:

:6m0
Thu Jun 30 02:44:30 PM EDT 2022
Dear Students,

I hope you find this really interesting.
Feel free to practice and play on the command line,
as well as use tools like Ed, the standard editor.

Sincerely,
Dr. Burns

You can use the arrow keys and Page Up/Page Down keys to navigate in vim, but by far the most excellent thing about this editor is to be able to use the j,k,l,h keys to navigate around a file:

• j moves down line by line
• k moves up line by line
• l moves right letter by letter
• h moves left letter by letter

Like the other commands, you can precede this with addresses. To move 2 lines down, you type 2j, and so forth. vim has had such a powerful impact on software development that programmers have built these keystrokes into applications like Gmail, Facebook, and more.

To save the file and exit vim, return to command mode by pressing the Esc key, and then write and quit:

:wq

The above barely scratches the surface. There are whole books on these editors as well as websites, videos, etc that explore them in more detail.

nano

The nano text editor is the user-friendliest of these text editors. The friendliest thing about nano is that it is modeless. You're already accustomed to using modeless editors in GUI apps. Modeless simply means that you can add and manipulate text without changing to insert or command mode. It is also familiar because it uses control keys to perform its operations. The tricky part is that the control keys are assigned to different keystroke combinations than what many might be used to. For example, instead of Ctrl-c or Cmd-c to copy, in nano you press the M-6 key (press Alt, Cmd, or Esc key and 6) to copy. Then to paste, you press Ctrl-u instead of the more common Ctrl-v. Fortunately, nano lists the shortcuts at the bottom of the screen.

The shortcuts listed need some explanation. The carat mark is shorthand for the keyboard's Control (Ctrl) key. Therefore to Save As a file, we write out the file by pressing Ctrl-o. The M- key is also important, and depending on your keyboard configuration, it may correspond to your Alt, Cmd, or Esc keys. To search for text, you press ^W, If your goal is to copy, then press M-6 to copy a line. Move to where you want to paste the text, and press Ctrl-u to paste.

For the purposes of this class, that's all you really need to know about nano. Use it and get comfortable writing in it. Some quick tips:

1. nano file.txt will open and display the file named file.txt.
2. nano by itself will open to an empty page.
3. Save a file by pressing Ctrl-o.
4. Quit and save by pressing Ctrl-x.
5. Be sure to follow the prompts at the bottom of the screen.

micro and tilde

nano is usually installed by default on many Linux distributions, which is why I cover it here. However, if you want to use a more modern modeless editor, then I suggest micro, tilde, or edit.

The following apt command installs both micro and tilde at the same time.

sudo apt install micro tilde

We can launch them with or without file names. To launch micro without a file name as an argument:

micro

To launch tilde:

tilde

The micro text editor uses standard key combinations like Ctrl-S to save, Ctrl-O to open, Ctrl-Q to quit. The tilde text editor also uses the standard key combinations, but it also has a menu bar. To access the menu bar, you press the Alt key plus the first letter of the menu bar option. For example, Alt-f opens the File Menu, etc.

edit

The edit text editor is a new, open source editor from Microsoft that's inspired by the original MS-DOS editor from the early 1990s. Although it is built for use on Windows, it can be installed on Linux. To install, visit the program's GitHub releases link and copy the URL for the file named: edit-[version]-x86-64-linux-gnu.tar.zst, where [version] equals the most recent version. We can use wget to download the source file to our servers. For example, to download the most recent version, which at the time of writing this is version 1.2.0:

wget https://github.com/microsoft/edit/releases/download/v1.2.0/edit-1.2.0-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.zst

The file is compressed. To decompress it, we use the following tar command:

tar --use-compress-program=unzstd -xvf edit-1.2.0-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.zst

This will output a file called edit. Move this file to an executable $PATH, such as /usr/local/bin:

sudo mv edit /usr/local/bin

Once moved, you can use edit to work with files like you would with micro or tilde.

edit [file_name]

Note that the GitHub page for edit provides instructions for installing this editor on Windows, in case you're interested in doing so.

Conclusion

In prior lessons, we learned how to use the bash command prompt and how to view, manipulate, and edit files from that shell. In this lesson, we learned how to use several command line text editors. Editors allow us to save our commands, create scripts, and in the future, edit configuration files.

The commands we used in this lesson include:

• ed : line-oriented text editor
• vim : Vi IMproved, a programmer's text editor
• nano : Nano's ANOther editor, inspired by Pico
• micro: A modern and intuitive terminal-based text editor
• tilde: The Tilde Text Editor
• edit: Microsoft text editor