Published at LXer:

Having a consistent and capable editor available on any system is important, especially important for people who move from machine to machine for whatever reason. People who administer UNIX systems or who help others with their operating system (like many Linux User Group members) need to edit files quickly. The family of editors known as vi (including nvi, aka. vi on BSD) is very useful for this. Some of the reasons for its success are the use of classic UNIX philosophy, regular expressions, keyboard use (no mouse required) and plugins. The learning curve is a bit steep for beginners. Because text editors are written for use in terminals they can be used even across platforms with the help of fink (brew and others) on Mac OSX and cygwin on Windows. Text editors are clearly not WYSIWYG word processors.

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