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. |