100 Useful Command-Line Utilities

by Oliver; 2014

63. nano, emacs, vim

nano is a basic a text editor that should come pre-packaged with your linux distribution. There are two fundamental commands you need to know to use nano:

• Cntrl-O - Save
• Cntrl-X - Quit

nano is not a great text editor and you shouldn't use it for anything fancy. But for simple tasks—say, pasting swaths of text into a file—it's a good choice.

For more serious text editing, use Vim or Emacs. These programs have too many features to discuss in this post but, as a Vim partisan, I have an introduction to Vim here.

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