Text Editors

we spend a lot of time editing text: email, source code of different type, log files, software output, databases. Therefore it is necessary to choose a powerful editor, and to use it efficiently. Here, such editors are recommended, and links, tips and tricks are shared to use them efficiently.

Vim:

General:

Vim (http://www.vim.org/) is a powerful text editor. It is often compared with emacs (http://www.xemacs.org/), both are considered excellent editors to work with. There is even some rivalry between users (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_war). Yet, for professional editing, both, vim and emacs are to recommend.
Vim is not an editor where you use your mouse, but you control all with the keyboard. There are so called `modes', one to type in text, one to type commands, and one to visually mark text. You can run commands from the operating system within vim, use regular expressions, and program and run macros. Vim is capable to handle huge files being still able to execute commands (e.g. search and replace) on the text.
To give a flavor of vim's power, to introduce Bram Molenaar who is a great Dutch open source developer, and to give tips to improve text editing skills see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6K4iIMlouI

Links:

• Introductions: http://blog.interlinked.org/tutorials/vim_tutorial.html
• Bram Molenaar (the author of vim): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Moolenaar, http://www.moolenaar.net/
• Vim pages: vim: http://www.vim.org/, vim-wiki: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Vim_Tips_Wiki,

Tips:

• very useful to figure out how to do something you would like to do with your text: search within the mailing list archive of vim-users:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/vimannounce/

• you might want to use vim from within xmgrace (e.g. create set from editor). To do it you set environment variable in .cshrc:
  setenv GRACE_EDITOR 'xterm -e vi'