How To
Summary
A great editor to use on MS Windows
Objective
Some Unix users swear by EMACS, others prefer to use vi.
I fall into the latter category. Having been in support and services teams for many years, often working on customers' computers, vi was always there when I was working on a Unix machine, but EMACS usually wasn't.
In some flavours of Unix and/or Linux, vi might live in the /usr filesystem, so knowing how to use ed(1) can also be useful to fix up a broken /etc/fstab.
Environment
The desktop system that I use on a day to day basis is a ThinkPad running Microsoft's Windows 10. There are, of course various editors such as Notepad, Wordpad and Word, and each has it's own benefits. For many years though, I have also been using vim. (Vi IMproved).
Effectively it allows you to use the familiar environment of vi on a Windows or DOS platform. It is also available for many other platforms.
In fact if you use Linux, you may already be using vim:
tom:~ # ls -l /usr/bin/vi
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Dec 9 11:59 /usr/bin/vi -> /bin/vim
The official website is http://www.vim.org/ and you can download executables and get documentation etc from there.
Here is what Wikipedia has to say about it's legal status:
Vim is free and open source software and is released under a license that includes some charityware clauses, encouraging users who enjoy the software to consider donating to children in Uganda.[5] The license is compatible with the GNU General Public License.
And there is more about the license on the official site.
Effectively it allows you to use the familiar environment of vi on a Windows or DOS platform. It is also available for many other platforms.
In fact if you use Linux, you may already be using vim:
tom:~ # ls -l /usr/bin/vi
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Dec 9 11:59 /usr/bin/vi -> /bin/vim
The official website is http://www.vim.org/ and you can download executables and get documentation etc from there.
Here is what Wikipedia has to say about it's legal status:
Vim is free and open source software and is released under a license that includes some charityware clauses, encouraging users who enjoy the software to consider donating to children in Uganda.[5] The license is compatible with the GNU General Public License.
And there is more about the license on the official site.
Additional Information
Document Location
Worldwide
[{"Business Unit":{"code":"BU058","label":"IBM Infrastructure w\/TPS"},"Product":{"code":"HW1A1","label":"IBM Power Systems"},"Component":"","Platform":[{"code":"PF002","label":"AIX"},{"code":"PF050","label":"BMC"},{"code":"PF041","label":"HMC"},{"code":"PF012","label":"IBM i"},{"code":"PF016","label":"Linux"}],"Version":"All Versions","Edition":"","Line of Business":{"code":"LOB57","label":"Power"}}]
Was this topic helpful?
Document Information
Modified date:
03 May 2021
UID
ibm11118187