21 Dec 2000 by L. Grove. This document covers the basics of the Emacs and Vi editors, as well as the basics of bash startup files. A version for csh and tcsh is available here . Emacs and Vi Two of the primary UNIX text editors are programs called emacs and vi . A text editor is not a word processor .
Word processors have facilities for dealing with typesetting text, font changes, page layouts, etc.
Later in the semester we'll meet LaTeX, one of the most well known UNIX typesetting packages. If you already know emacs or vi, I suggest that you continue using whichever one you know. It is generally accepted that emacs is a lot more extensible than vi. For example, it can do color syntax highlighting of source code for many programming languages. If you are interested in such things, consider emacs.