Full course description
Term: Spring 2025
Date: March 7th, 2025
Time: 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: Online Only
Instructor: Chris Kuhlman
Presesnted By: Advanced Research Computing (ARC)
Description:
There are many reasons to learn text editors. The most obvious one is to construct files (e.g., programming language source code files and data files). But there are many others. Editors can be used to perform minor corrections to file contents (source code, data, and other files), and even to perform major corrections if there is a pattern to the required edit. They can also be powerful tools in combination with other software tools like awk and sed, and even bash scripting. In fact, sometimes editors like vi can be used to perform tasks more easily than using data processing tools like awk. vi is one of a class of powerful text editors (others are emacs and IDEs provided by programming language tools like those of JetBrains or VSCode by Microsoft). Some software developers use vi to construct massively large codes (in lieu of a programming language IDEs). Some manuscript developers that use a powerful document preparation system (called Latex) use vi to construct manuscript files. vi is available on all computers with linux and unix operating systems. It is attractive because one can be especially fast with vi, since the user’s hands never leave the keyboard (e.g., one does not use a pad or mouse to click). Learning vi is useful in its own right, to help you be more productive, but you can multiply that productivity if you know how to use vi in combination with other tools. You will learn vi in this workshop.