FluffyMcDeath wrote:
Forget vi .
You want Vim!!!
That's Vi IMproved.
It's hugely capable. Yes, it takes a bit of getting used to, but so does everything.
It started life on the Amiga back in 1988.
Props there - I forgot all about the heritage. 'Vim' is indeed the best 'vi' for serious work. Do forgive us BSD fans for snickering at distros that use it by default, though -
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 1301332 Jul 8 03:08 vim
-r-xr-xr-x 6 root wheel 311156 Jun 5 00:24 nvi
...I think they're compensating for something.
(Seriously for those trying to learn from this, it's a degree-of-complexity 'debate.' Vim is cool, but the question is how far you trust it to work and not have possibly relied on an unnecessary dependency when your system's just blown apart. The answer, of course, is that you can trust it quite far, because any kinks have long-since been ironed out, but shipping something 'simple' by default lets you worry about other things, like why you had to be in single-user with partitions unmountable. The 5.x-branch of FreeBSD is in the process of trashing some of its recovery niceties in tradeoff for some new features, anyway... and if you run out of a single / partition with no separate /usr, you'll never get in a situation to notice the differences anyway; either your system will be hosed or it won't. ;-))
Asian1 said,
Another editor: SED (Stream editor).
Try "man sed"
Man, sometimes I can't tell if you're kidding. ;-) sed is a great tool - and part of the 'grep, awk, sed' trinity of 'things with silly names that hold UNIX together,' but it'd take a brave, slightly insane man to use it for daily editing. It's quite handy for things like find/replace on a file ('stream') from the command line, once you've learned all about regular expressions...