Text editors

A text editor is a program used for editing text files. Most configuration of Linux systems is done by editing text files. All Linux distributions ship with multiple text editors included.

There are two types of text editors in Linux:

  • commandline editors – vi, nano, pico
  • GUI editors – gedit (for GNOME), KWrite (for KDE)

If we want to edit a file called textfile.txt using gedit, we would type gedit textfile.txt. This opens up textfile.txt for editing:

linux gedit

Here is the same file opened in nano:

linux nano


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