Try "which" followed by the name of some of the more common ones (emacs, vi, vim, nano, pico), one at a time to keep the returned strings simple. I find this method safer than just arbitrarily entering a command (the name of one) and finding out I can't exit it without terminating the shell session (or worse).

Whichever one comes up with a path to an executable, like /usr/bin/emacs2 instead of a lot of garbage telling you where editor x isn't in your execution or environment paths, that's the one you have.

And you may have more than one. Try them out and see which one you're more attuned to.

BZT

I use vi on all system where I have shell, but I also love KomodoEdit - it's free, and they support "vi bindings" so I can have the best of all things... including code completion/hints, templates, projects, etc. while still being able to maneuver efficiently using vi commands.

that's so true. i started using nano because it's the suggested editor in debian linux. it's likely the easiest editor to startout with for console use since all the common commands are shown in the editor so you can't forget how it works - even the old ms-dos edit.com wasn't that easy (if a unix clone version of that comes out i may just go back to that blue and white interface - the blue screen of death that you can edit .

vi is fun to play with though - although the only thing i can seem to remember is :q to quit - or is it :x to exit? i forgot how vi works long ago when red hat 7 killed my system and i found nano+debian. of course i only used vi mabe a dozen times - i've used nano several thousand times at least.

if i need to learn how an editor works, it's no longer a simple editor and i won't bother. editors should be simple and just work. an editor should be like "more" or "less" with a curser and the ability to save and perhaps the ability to tell me what line i'm on, but let's not get too fancy. i shouldn't have to use "man vi" everytime i forget something that should be obvious.

of course i have respect for the vi folks - although my favorite retro editor is to just use "sed" - very quick.

I found a pretty good editor when I am on my XP box called Notepad++

I've been writing some PHP/MySQL code on my XP laptop, and it works pretty good

I use a variety of editors depending on where im at and what im doing. I use vi or preferably vim for light things like editing configuration files or quick and dirty scripts. If I am doing something heavier such as writing a 1000+ line perl program I will use a nice graphical programmers editor such as nedit, gedit, or jedit. I recommend any new UNIX user and especially professionals to be able to at minimum do basic things with 2 terminal based editors such as vi or emacs. Investing a little bit of time learning to use awk and sed has yielded a ridiculously large rate of return on my time.

VIM all the way.