Re: Shell based text editor for writing prose

[Shyamal Prasad <shyamal.prasad@sbcglobal.net>]

    "John" == John Griffiths <johnboy@the-riotact.com> writes:

    John> G'day all.  Due to a somewhat complicated set of
    John> circumstances I'm looking for a decent non graphical shell
    John> based text editor to write prose with.

    John> basically i want to be able to ssh onto my server and write
    John> from a number of remote locations.

My personal choice is emacs. Be warned, however, that emacs is an
operating system masquerading as an editor ;-) I learned to use on
VT220 terminals where it gave me the window system and IDE I wanted.

If you really want a simple but very powerful editor just use vi (or
vim or some other vi clone on steroids). If you are just writing plain
prose with minimal markup and want auto-fill and the ability to move
around paragraphs, words and so on vi rocks, is available on all Unix
systems, and is worth the considerable effort it will take to learn to
use it.

I can also recommend nano (a pico clone) that is quick and easy.

I'm sure you will get a lot of other recommendations. The best bet is
try each one, and stick to the one you like best.

Cheers!
Shyamal