I usually use either the Vim or the elvis text editor, greatly enhanced versions of vi, featuring windows, mouse capability and many other conveniences. The current version of Vim has features which include

• an especially eye-appealing X11 GUI, with nice icons
• menus, both default and user-configurable, which obviate the need to remember various mappings

The Red Hat distribution of Linux uses Vim as its version of vi. (It is apparently not the GUI-compiled version, though the latter, under the name of GVim, is on our CSIF Linux PCs.)

Here is information on Vim:

• Vim home page.

• Official Vim documentation.

• My brief notes on how to use Vim.

Another greatly enhanced version of vi, comparable to Vim (better in some ways, not as good in others) is elvis.

Other software Web sites by Norm Matloff:

• Professor Matloff's Unix/C tutorials.

• His Java tutorial.

• Dr. Matloff's beginner's guide to installing and using Linux.

• His "Extremely Quick and Simple Introduction to the Vi Text editor," and his introductions to the elvis and vim extensions to vi. The latter are much better than ordinary vi (and far, far better than pico). X11 mouse capability; subwindows (even on nongraphics terminals); infinite undo; paragraph formatting and so on.

• Norman Matloff's guide to fast debugging! See also his text-editing tips designed especially for programmers.

• Professor Matloff's LaTeX tutorial and resource page, and his tutorial on LyX, a GUI interface to LaTeX.

• Dr. Matloff's introduction to the mutt e-mail utility. Don't use pine! It was designed for people who are afraid of computers, not for computer experts.

• Norm Matloff's Chinese-language software page.