Linux Pocket Guide

File Creation and Editing

emacs	Text editor from Free Software Foundation
vim	Text editor, extension of Unix vi
umask	Set a default mode for new files and directories
soffice	Office suite for editing Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents
abiword	Edit Microsoft Word documents
gnumeric	Edit Excel spreadsheets

To get far with Linux, you must become proficient with one of its text editors. The two major ones are emacs from the Free Software Foundation, and vim, a successor to the Unix editor vi. Teaching these editors fully is beyond the scope of this book, but both have online tutorials, and we list common operations in Table 1-1. To edit a file, run either:

$ emacs myfile
$ vim myfile

If myfile doesn’t exist, it is created automatically. You can also quickly create an empty file (for later editing) using the touch command (see File Properties):

$ touch newfile

or write data into a new file by redirecting the output of a program (see Input/output redirection):

$ echo anything at all > newfile

In case you share files with Microsoft Windows systems, we will also cover Linux programs that edit Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents.