OSU Computational Physics - Landau Research Group (nacse) -
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Basic

§ 7: Editing Files

While it may be interesting to read files, it's necessary to change some if you want to accomplish anything on a computer. One way to change the contents of a file is with a text editor.

There are five editors you are likely to find on a workstation cluster:

The vi editor is powerful, rather universal, effective even over nongraphics terminals, and rather dated. The pico editor is more modern, and is pretty nice for a non-mouse editor. The emacs editor, which you can learn about in an emacs tutorial, is a powerful editor which does so much that some people consider it close to an operating system! It's probably a bit much for a novice. The nedit and xemacs editors are mouse driven and similar to the word processors used on PCs or Macs; they are probably the best editors for novices.

All of these editors are self-documenting, which means they contain tutorials or help documents that you can run once you're in the editor. The commands to start the tutorials will be given as the editors are discussed.

After you have completed the instructional portions of this section, you will be asked to complete a Review Quiz in which you construct a home page for the World Wide Web. You will continue to work with your home page throughout the tutorial.

  1. Using vi
    1. Moving
    2. Making Changes
    3. Saving and Exiting
  2. Other Editors
  3. Review Quiz
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