Working with Text

Text editors are among the most common—and essential—applications. You’ll need to know how to edit text to accomplish just about any of the tasks described throughout the rest of this book, and it’s a good idea to find a text editor that you like as early as possible in your FreeBSD career.

Unlike a word processor, a text editor simply works on plain-text files (which, in FreeBSD, can be denoted with any kind of filename, with any kind of extension—not just .txt). It does not have the ability to store font changes, styles, margins, or any other such information in the document because plain-text files don’t support such formatting information. Plain-text files make up a great deal of the FreeBSD system, from configuration files ...

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