to create /bin/ls. This text file is the source code. Comparing /bin/ls to
/etc/profile illustrates how important source code is if someone wants to
understand and modify a piece of software. Free software provides you or
your consultants with this all-important source code.

Text Editors

A text editor is a program used to create and change the contents of text
files. Most operating systems have a text editor: DOS has edit, Windows
has Notepad, MacOS has SimpleText.

Debian provides a large variety of text editors. vi and Emacs are the
classic two, which are probably both the most powerful and the most widely
used. Both vi and Emacs are quite complex and require some practice, but
they can make editing text extremely efficient. Emacs runs both in a
terminal and under the X Window system; vi normally runs in a terminal but
the vim variant has a -g option that allows it to work with X. text
editors

Simpler editors include nedit, ae, jed, and xcoral. nedit and xcoral
provide easy-to-use X Window system graphical interfaces. There are also
several vi variants. Additionally, you can find and a GNU Emacs variant
called XEmacs.

This book does not cover the use of any particular editor in detail,
though we will briefly introduce ae since it is small, fast, and can be
found even on the Debian rescue disks, so it pays to know a bit about it
for usage in a pinch. When you need to do more serious editing, check out
vim or GNU Emacs. Emacs provides an excellent interactive tutorial of its
own; to read it, load Emacs with the emacs command and type F1 t. Emacs is