Let the editor wars begin!

Well Armed

Today I want to discuss options for a key critical tool: the editor. The editor can be one of the most important tools, if not the most important tool, for systems administrators. It's also the tool that will generate a tremendous amount of – shall we say – discussion , possibly resulting in the exchange of insults and general loathing of our fellow human beings. Despite the risks, discussing editors is a useful, interesting, and worthwhile exercise. I argue that systems administration needs a command-line editor, because it can be used even if X windows isn't working or isn't installed on the servers. Knowing how to use SSH and a command-line editor has saved my admin bacon on several occasions. You don't have to be an expert, but you do need to know enough commands to edit files and be comfortable with the editor.

After knowing and being comfortable with a command-line editor – enough that you can SSH to a server and edit a configuration file – you can either choose to learn a second graphical user interface (GUI) editor or not. A GUI editor can be advantageous if you are a visual person (like me), but it's not a requirement. Personally, I use a GUI editor or two when writing code and writing documents.

Assumptions and Ground Rules

Before jumping into editor options, I want to put down the assumptions I'm using in my selection of what editors to write about. The starting assumptions are:

The focus is on open source editors.
The desire is for multiplatform editors, although this isn't a hard and fast rule, but at a minimum it has to run on Linux.
The focus is on text editors and not Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). IDEs are a different beast with different feature sets; however, a few editors I will mention can function as a very basic IDE.
My goal is to present editor options and list some of their more significant

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