The majority of your Linux systems are going to be servers and these are not going to have a GUI. I also mentioned in the last session that Linux is mostly made up of configuration files, to make changes you are going to need to be able to edit those configuration files to change anything on the system.
There are lots of options out there but I think we should cover probably the two most common terminal text editors. I have used both of these editors and for me, I find `nano` the easy button when it comes to quick changes but `vim` has such a broad set of capabilities.
If you run `nano 90DaysOfDevOps.txt` we will create a new file with nothing in, from here we can add our text and we have our instructions below for what we want to do with that file.
We can now run `cat` against that file to read our file. We can then use that same `nano 90DaysOfDevOps.txt` to add additional text or modify your file.
We can jump into vim with the `vim` command or if we want to edit our new txt file we could run `vim 90DaysOfDevOps.txt` but you are going to first see the lack of help menus at the bottom.
You start in `normal` mode, there are other modes `command, normal, visual, insert`, if we want to add the text we will need to switch from `normal` to `insert` we need to press `i` if you have added some text and would like to save these changes then you would hit escape and then `:wq`
There is some cool fast functionality with vim that allows you to do menial tasks very quickly if you know the shortcuts which is a lecture in itself. Let's say we have added a list of repeated words and we now need to change that, maybe it's a configuration file and we repeat a network name and now this has changed and we quickly want to change this. I am using the word day for this example.
Copy and Paste was a big eye-opener for me. Copy is not copied it is yanked. we can copy using `yy` on our keyboard in normal mode. `p` paste on the same line, `P` paste on a new line.
There is also likely a time you will need to search a file, now we can use `grep` as mentioned in a previous session but we can also use vim. we can use `/word` and this will find the first match, to navigate through to the next you will use the `n` key and so on.
A common interview question is what is your favourite text editor in Linux and I would make sure you have at least this knowledge of both so you can answer, it is fine to say nano because it's simple. At least you show competence in understanding what a text editor is. But get hands-on with them to be more proficient.
