A.4. More on text editors

This section provides further reading for the topics covered in Chapter 5, Text editors.

A.4.1. More on vi and Vim

Vim has its own website and documentation.

A ~575-page book on Vim is available on the Web (in .pdf), with errata for the book listed here.

Prof. Norm Matloff (mentioned in Section A.2.1, “General Linux resources”) has An Extremely Quick and Simple Introduction to the Vi Text Editor.

NGEDIT Software has a graphical vi-vim cheat sheet and tutorial in GIF and SVG formats.

If you'd like to try the original vi, check out the traditional ex/vi project.

Perhaps the best way to learn how to use Vim is through its built-in tutorial, which you can reach by typing vimtutor at the shell prompt in a terminal. Since you can't modify the read-only “master copy” of the tutor, vimtutor makes a temporary copy of it that you can modify, allowing you to learn by doing rather than by reading and trying to memorize.

As for books:

Robbins, Arnold. vi Editor Pocket Reference. Sebastopol: O'Reilly, 1998.

Robbins, Arnold, and Linda Lamb. Learning the vi Editor. 6th ed. Sebastopol: O'Reilly, 1998.

Robbins, Arnold, and Elbert Hannah and Linda Lamb. Learning the vi and Vim Editors. 7th ed. Sebastopol: O'Reilly, 2008.

A.4.2. More on GNU Emacs

GNU has a web page for Emacs, online Emacs manuals, and An Introduction to Emacs Lisp Programming.

Prof. Norm Matloff (mentioned in Section A.2.1, “General Linux resources”) has a tutorial entitled Emacs: The Software Engineer's ``Swiss Army Knife''.

Don't forget about Emacs's built-in tutorial, which you can find by typing C-h t while in Emacs.

There's also the Emacs info page at info emacs.

As for books:

Cameron, Debra. GNU Emacs Pocket Reference. Sebastopol: O'Reilly, 1998.

Cameron, Debra, et al. Learning GNU Emacs. 3rd ed. Sebastopol: O'Reilly, 2005.

Chassell, Robert J. An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp. 2nd ed. Boston: GNU Press, 2004. This book can also be found online at the author's website.


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