Chapter 2: Using Text Editors
There's just no way around the topic of this chapter, as system administrators edit text files daily. Therefore, we decided to cover three commonly used editors – vi, Vim, and nano. If you're more into GUI tools, make sure that you check gedit, although we won't cover that editor here as it's practically the same as using Notepad on Microsoft Windows. There are various reasons why these editors were chosen, but most importantly, they are installed out of the box on almost all Linux distributions, so they're the most common pre-installed editors. There are situations where additional software installation is not an option, such as air-gapped environments.
We will cover the following recipes in this chapter:
- Learning the basics of the Vi(m) editor
- Learning the basics of the nano editor
- Going through the advanced Vi(m) settings
