Viewing, Editing, and Printing Files



next up previous contents index
Next: More and View Up: GETTING FRIENDLY WITH Previous: Alphabetized List of

Viewing, Editing, and Printing Files

To do something creative, like writing and running your own program, you must be able to view, edit, and print files. While viewing and printing is straightforward, editing can be a challenge-if not a disaster-until the editors are mastered. (As hyperuser says: while you should not think of computers as disasters waiting to strike, you should do some work to avoid future unhappiness.) Practice, caution, and backups of your work are good ideas-especially at first on a new system.  

In the latter part of this section we give a terse introduction to the vi editor, the full-screen editor available on most Unix systems. This is a powerful editor but is rather dated. If your system has an Emacs editor available, we recommend trying it first. While Emacs is not as universal as vi, it is easier, more modern, and more like the editors or word processors on personal computers. If you require more than a refresher, you may wish to refer to one of the texts listed in the Bibliography, or obtain tutorials commands such as:   

% learn vi Tutorial for vi .
% emacs tutorial Tutorial for Emacs.





next up previous contents index
Next: More and View Up: GETTING FRIENDLY WITH Previous: Alphabetized List of