Question

Hi,

What is in your opinion in this message related to Vi Text Editor?

I have never used a vi text editor before. I have always used word processors like Microsoft Word or notepad. It was very interesting to learn the basics of a text editor and learn that you can make a file right from that by using a couple of commands. I believe I would be able to use the text editor in the work field but I do not know as of right now how I would use it. The text editor I looked up is Gredit. It has a lot of the same features as vi but it has a graphical interface instead.

https://www.rollapp.com/app/gedit

Thank you.

Answer 1

Any editor you use is matter of which one you feel more comfortable using with and what is your use case,

gedit editor that you referred is indeed a graphical editor and it looks more of a notepad++ alternative for Unix/Linux platform.

People working on windows platform have liking for notepad++

As I earlier mentioned it also depends what is your purpose of using the editor. Will you be using from your programming purpose on Linux or you need it for administration purpose.

Few plus that I see with gedit editor is as follows:

1) In case you will be using only for your programming requirements the this looks to be a good fit, as it provides in-built syntax checks for number of programming languages.

2) GUI always gives a better readability and user experience. You get number of options in the menu bar which you can see and use and do not need to keep in mind necessarily for the shortcut keys.

3) editing the file becomes easy, it just like using the notepad.

cons that I see for the GUI based editor like "gedit":

1) if you job is of a system admin then you need to be quick enough to open multiple terminals and do tasks in parallel, GUI based editor tend to eat up more RAM.

2) in case you are jumping into your system from any other remote system then there is hassle of setting up the the display so that you can launch the GUI based editor into your current session from where you traversed to your destination system,Just to explain this little better, lets say you have your system "B" where you have all your work related files but you cannot login directly to it or cannot have GUI session of your system "B" ( ex: in case you login to your linux system using putty from your windows / MAC device) , in this case you will login to your system "B" via your current system "A". Now to open the GUI based editor on your system "B" so as to edit any file, you would have to set the display environment variable on your system "S" so as to send the display to system "A" and in case system "A" has some firewall , security settings then you would end up troubleshooting those.

Pros of non GUI editors like "vi":

1) Most of the system admins around the world prefer to use the editors like "vi", "vim" etc. As they sometime need multiple sessions when troubleshooting any issue/problem and "vi" editor are preferred,.

2) They eat up lesser memory when compared to GUI based editors.

3) it always feels like working on unix/ linux when using a text editor

4) There are many handy shortcuts which are required by system admins to quickly get the things done and as they work on these editors the options get memorized. Thus, feels more control while using them.

5) No hassle of any display forwarding.

cons of non GUI based editor "vi":

1) Ideally everything is been provided by the "vi" editor, thus I would not say preferably a con but yes in case you are a developer then you would like to see the syntax checks happening as you go on writing the code, this is where you may not get help from the editor. But yes, other are other tools available better than gedit those can be used for this purpose.

Thus, I would say if you are thinking of an editor to work with files on linux platform then the most ideal would be to use the "vi" editor , you would start loving it as you get more and more familiar and would find them more handy when using.

In case you are looking from code writing perspective then there are better software available then gedit.