A text editor is a program that manipulates plain text (ASCII). Most text editors are full screen editors (they display a full screen of text) as opposed to line editors (which display one line at a time). Emacs is a full screen text editor supported by RUCS. On RUCS UNIX machines the default version of Emacs is the GNU release of Emacs. There are a couple of different UNIX text editors available for use in creating and editing files. These UNIX text editors are applications that can be run either in a telnet session or an X-windows session. The three most popular UNIX text editors here at Rutgers are Emacs, Pico, and VI. Using these UNIX text editors allows you to program in any computer language and translate it into code that the computer will be able to read and execute.

There are also non-UNIX based text editors that are available as well. On Macintoshes you can use BB Edit and on PCs you can use Wordpad or Notepad. It suggested that you stay away from using MS Word or Word Perfect because of their auto spell check and syntax check functions. These functions create difficulties in having the code being interpreted properly and affect how smoothly your program will be executed. The difference between UNIX and non-UNIX based text editors is that by using the non-UNIX based text editors you will have to use Fetch or FTP in order to save the file to your Eden account. By using the UNIX based text editors, you can save yourself a couple of extra steps since the files will be directly saved to Eden. In this document we will only be dealing with UNIX based text editors.

Download Introduction to the Emacs, Pico, and VI Text Editors PDF