Text And Program Editing In Statistics

There are lots of text editors for Unix/Linux. These editers are good for editing text but do not typically show the WYSIWYG formatted result as you would get with something like MS-Word. Here is a brief subset of editors available in Statistics.

Line Editors

Line editors present text a line at a time with no cursor navigation around the text. One of the most basic line editor is ed. It should be universally available on all Unix/Linux systems.If you are interested, you can check out this nice little ed Tutorial.

Display Editors

Display editors allow you to navigate around a display screen full of text using a cursor but typically without mouse control.

One of the most universally known and available terminal editors is vi. It is relatively easy to use, but has substantial depth of features. To use them all takes a while to learn. There are vi tutorials all over the web. Here is an arbitrary example: An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi.

Another display editor is pico. It is also widely available and provides more guidance to a user while editing compared to vi. You don't need to memorize as many commands. It is considered simpler than vi but does not have the depth of functionality. Again, many pico tutorials are availabe, and as an arbitrary example, you can check: Pico: A Unix text editor.

Window Editors

Window editors present a point-and-click interface that can be navigated with a mouse as well as a keyboard. These editors can also provide graphics features like highlighting, auto indenting and coloring of text depending on the context. This is particularly useful for programming (for example, C coding, HTML coding, etc) or for special command languages (for example, TEX).

A popular editor in Statistics is emacs (or xemacs). emacs is a very poweful editor with a great deal of expandability. It is a programmable environment in its own right, and it has been customized to do special tasks, like editing, debugging, executing and producing results documentation from R, all from within emacs. It can take some time to learn all the features, but it is still fairly easy to get started with it. Again, emacs tutorials are "everywhere". Most are introductions, for example: A Tutorial Introduction to GNU Emacs. By the time you want in-depth understanding of emacs, you will be able to find the level of tutorial or documentation you need. xemacs puts an Xwindow appearance and added functionality around emacs.

Another available window editor is nedit. Nedit has a feel that is similar to MS-Windows text editors, so it may be easy to pick up by MS-Windows users. While it has many advanced features, it is not as powerful or popular as emacs, and the number of knowledgeable users is smaller. A sample tutorial: Nirvana Editor (NEdit) Help Documentation.

-- MikeRedmond - 12 Aug 2005