As distributed, most Unix systems come with a a number of standard text
editors, including ed, ex, sed, and vi.
The first three of these are line-oriented editors; the last is a
full-screen editor that is quite popular at Unix installations around the
country. Many systems also include a very powerful screen editor called
emacs, or some variant of it.
However, if you are used to the EDT full-screen editor available on most DEC
operating systems, including VMS, you will no doubt find even vi to
be neanderthal at best. Among other transgressions, vi is a modal
editor, requiring you to continually change back and forth between command
mode and insertion mode. (This design was chosen because of a desire to
have vi run on the widest possible variety of terminals, since
vi relies only on standard ASCII text characters plus ESCAPE for
both text entry and commands.)
Having to use vi when one has access to DEC VT-series terminals with their nice function keys is a bit like having to push one's car to work instead of driving. Fortunately, there are other options.
Many Unix systems come with emulations of DEC's EDT editor. On the Unix
systems here at Gordon we use the program (jed). Jed is started
with the command:
jed filename
However, to properly work like EDT, you need to be using a terminal program
that can use the keypad correctly. On the SGI workstations you can do this
by typing vt100 at the shell prompt. This will open a new window
that will work like a VT100 terminal. Note: if you need to connect
to Gordon's VMS machines, you should use a VT100 terminal window.
Users who are familiar with EDT on VMS will find the emulation of EDT's
keypad commands to be quite complete. However, the line mode commands are
quite different. Typing gold keypad-7 followed by exit will exit the
program; jed will ask you whether or not you want to save your
file. (It's a good idea to say yes!) Don't use CTRL-Z to exit -
remember that's a shell command to stop your process! (If you do
accidentally type CTRL-Z, you will be returned to the shell prompt. Type
fg to return your editing session to the
foreground.) Note also that, when editing a .c or .h file,
jed does automatic formatting of tabs, returns, and braces ({ }).
(Users can configure jed; see the manual page on jed for
more information).
If you like using jed, you may want to try xjed. This is basically
the same editor, but creates is on GUI window. In addition, when editing
files of certain types that jed knows about, i.e. C++ program source files,
xjed will use color to distinguish different parts of the source code.
The GUI editor included with IRIX is called jot To start it, type
jot filename
You can then use the menu bar in the jot window to control your editing session.