In one of my Cluster Users’ Group lectures I mentioned that good text editing skills – whether in pico, vi, or emacs – are the key to simplifying a cluster user’s life. Since then, several of you have requested more information on this topic, perhaps even another meeting and lecture covering this topic. The thing is, someone’s standing up and lecturing on how to use vi is far different from you the user sitting down with an appropriate tutorial or cheat sheet and just using the editor. To this end, I’m going to compile here a list of online resources that may be helpful for anyone wanting to become a text-editing champion.

As is always the case on Linux, you can consult the man page for each of these programs, as well.

Under Linux these days, you’re not really using vi, you’re using a newer variant called vim. But it behaves just like its predecessor so if I hadn’t mentioned it, you probably would never have been the wiser!

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi
• http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/vi-guide.xml (Do not try to load gvim on your system as they suggest.)
• http://www.lagmonster.org/docs/vi.html
• http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/vi6/ (If you’re old-school and prefer paper documentation!)

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico_text_editor
• pico features online help while you’re using the editor (type Ctrl-G)

I’ve never been a fan of emacs. There are several variants, one of which runs directly through X11 and will give you a graphical user interface to the editor. Programmers tend to like to use emacs because it has features that make editing program code somewhat more friendly. But program code is one instance where I tend to do the editing locally, on my desktop machine, using my favorite text editor 1)

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs
• http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/keith/tcl-course/emacs-tutorial.html
• http://www.est.ufpr.br/Rtutorial/emacsintro.html
• http://www.rice.edu/Computer/Documents/Unix/unix5.pdf

Feel free to edit this page and add more references as you see fit, cluster users!