Chapter 9. Text files and editors
A text editor is a simple editor that presents text without any formatting like bold, italics, or underline. Text editors only show text and line breaks (some might preserve indenting). Text editors, like Windows Notepad and OS X’s TextEdit, are wonderful tools on any operating system but are especially useful on Linux systems because:
- They allow you to edit configuration files in your Linux system.
- They keep you away from proprietary formats that might require certain software.
- They last forever. Long after civilization has ended, text files will still be openable and readable.
This chapter will discuss the power and beauty of text files and will walk you through some common Linux text editors. In the previous chapter, we talked about word processors, which are fantastic tools, but also complex ones. Text editors allow you to work with just text and not formatting, making text files easy to move between operating systems without losing any information. I’m not writing this book in a word processor, but with a text editor. I’ll discuss this process later in the chapter.