UNIX Desktop Questions & Answers

Try using one of these free text editors. They have much more functionality.

Textpad
TextPad - the text editor for Windows

Programmers File Editor (PFE)
Programmer's File Editor Home Page

The newline characters are different between Unix and Windows. So if you write a script in Windows, it may not work in Unix.

dos2unix is one utility that you can use to clean up your windows text files for use in Unix.

i'd say use notepad ...

however ...

regardless of what text editor one uses in windows, one should always get proficient in vi at a minimum --- ed would be even better --- since that would be the only text editor one can get if one runs into server problems and needs to modify files to get things working again ...

... there are two options, and they're both freeware.

* Crimson Editor, which is so great for creating, editing and saving Unix files that I now have it set to edit practically every .dot file in my Cygwin install.

* Alpine, a standalone version of Pine (Unix email client) and Pico (text editor) paired by their authors and onetime maintainers at the University of Washington. The Pico standalone app saves in UTF-8, so it might be worthwhile checking some of its saved output via cat or vi before uploading any of it. I'm partial to Pico and nano anyway, so I was very gratified to find there was a Win32 standalone of the former.

Here I would have to agree. Even the OS X Terminal, while providing nano (and maybe pico too, nowadays, who knows), installs with vim (vi modified) as the $EDITOR selection in its .bashrc. And most of the helps and how-to's for Mac command-line you find on the Web assume you use vim as your editor.

Hope this was helpful.

BZT

No panacea that dos2unix (or 'tleast maybe the one I use isn't robust enough).

I've had occasions happen where it left garbage characters (carat-qmark pairings particularly) in files I thought were, at minimum, ASCII and the line-endings just needed tweaking. I find the better approach to be to use a CLI editor or the GUI one I mentioned in my previous post, Crimson Editor.

BZT

Thanks for all the replies. I ended up learning to edit w/ VI.