Shell programming is text, be it BASH, KornShell, Shell or whatever, it's text.
That means a text editor is in order. Fancy-schmancy graphics? Uh, no, just text.
The base text editor is
vi; however, in many Linux systems,
vi is a symbolic link to
elvis, "a clone of the ex/vi text editor" that has, over time, exhibited little glitches here and there and has been (and should be) replaced with
vim, "Vi IMproved, a programmers text editor."
You'll probably find
vi is
/usr/bin/vi.
Code:
su - { or use sudo }
<root password>
cd /usr/bin
ls -l vi
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 5 Nov 22 2013 vi -> elvis*
{ the symbolic link is to /usr/bin/elvis, you want to change that }
{ make sure you have vim }
ls -l vim
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2235144 Oct 2 2013 vim*
{ yep, got it, make the link }
rm vi
ln -s vim vi
{ check it }
ls -l vi
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Dec 26 12:16 vi -> vim*
Ctrl-D
vim has color syntax highlighting (which drives me nuts but you may like it). Doesn't have, have as fare as I know, completion. It works just fine.
Something you may not be aware of about
vi/vim is that it has settings that are quite useful, especially for code.
Get into your home directory and do this:
Code:
cat > .exrc
set autoindent showmode showmatch
Ctrl-D
When you're typing code and hit the tab key at the beginning of a line the editor will automatically indent one level and stay there until you type another tab (to indent further) or Ctrl-D to back up one indent level. Makes your code readable.
The
showmatch setting causes the cursor to jump back to a matching paren, bracket or brace when you type a closing paren, bracket or brace (), [], {}. Helps you get the right number of closings to openings; it just jumps, so you have to watch.
Hope this helps some.
