Vim is not user friendly for newbies, but, after climbing the rather steep learning curve, its an extremely powerful text editor and it very popular among experienced system administrators. Cent. OS users will find vim pre installed on their servers. Two things to note about vim are, firstly, it has a modal interface. Depending on which mode the text editor is in, it will behave differently in response to commands. The main modes are normal mode, which is the default mode when vim starts up and is also called command mode. Centos 5 Software Raid 1 Performance AutoIn this mode, vim interprets keystrokes as commands, not as text to add to the document. Insert mode, which is achieved by pressing i while in command mode, is for text entry. You can press escape to get back to the command mode. The second thing youll need to know is how to quit vim press escape to make sure youre in command mode, and then enter q. This quits immediately without saving. To save first, enter command mode and type wq, which saves writes and then quits. Vim is hard going at first, but if you stick with it and learn the most common commands youll find it a very powerful text editor which will reward the effort put into learning how to use it properly. Emacs. Emacs was vims rival in the editor wars. Its a wonderful piece of software and very different from vim. Emacs doesnt have a modal interface, and it also goes against the Unix philosophy of do one thing well. Emacs does just about everything you might want to do with text, up to and including email. While Emacs may seem more intuitive to users not familiar with modal interfaces, it has its own quirks, including a vast array of complex keyboard shortcuts, although learning the core set of Emacs commands is no more difficult than learning Vims commands. Emacs is in the base repo, so its only a yum command away. Nano. Nano is a lot closer to what most users are already familiar with. It is a much simpler beast than either Vim or Emacs, and is fairly straightforward to use. As with most command line tools nano is controlled by keyboard shortcuts, but they are fewer and more intuitive than the more powerful editors. Dot Hack Gu Vol 2 Crimson Vs. If all you need to do is a quick config file edit, then Nano is more than capable, and wont trip you up quite so often. Nano isnt installed by default on Cent. OS, but it is in the base repo. The best advice for users new to the command line is to try out Vim and Emacs to see which fits your way of working, and, if they dont suit you, you can try something thats a bit easier to get along with, like nano. There are also some other options out there share any other recommendations in the commentsLinux, Sys. Admin Tools, System Administration.