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Before I ever tried or owned a computer I read about them, and decided that what I needed most for my writing career to take off and prolific was to have a computer. That would put an end to pausing to throw the typewriter carriage back to the left at the end of each line. And glory be - I wouldn’t have to crumple a sheet of paper and start over every time I made a typo! I could fix it all perfectly first and then print my articles, stories, and documents. Ah-ha! the end of white-out and correcto-ribbons! I went through so many of those.

Well, when some people get to a computer they often look for the games, and they do nothing but play boring games. However, you may be one of the many millions, who like me, want your computer to be a writing machine. Guess what, a linux operating system is ready to help you with this in a handful of fine ways.

If you are looking for a fancy word processing program, most distributions of Linux come with AbiWord, KWord, (part of the KOffice suite) and the OpenOffice.org which is every bit as good or better than MS Word. But there are some smaller, lean/mean text programs hidden in the system too. Let’s discover those just now.

There are 3 or 4 plain text editors that will pop up in your console when you issue a brief command, like;
vi (brings up the vi editor). To get out of it, use this command: ESC :q
It has more complicated commands to learn. It’s the oldest and had loyal users.

joe (brings up the joe editor). To exit use Ctrl+K+X to save and quit, or just Ctrl+C to quit without saving. It uses the control key (^) plus two other letter keys to get around. Like Ctrl +K+H gets you help and a list of all the commands.

pico (brings up the pico editor). To quit this one, use Ctrl+X This one keeps the command clues at the bottom of your screen all the time, so you don’t have to memorize them. You’ll note that here it is just the Control key plus one other letter, so it is more simplified.

These are still fairly new to me. I need to try them a bit more often, but I do see that they can take the place of a lot of scribbles on scratch pads, if I need to make quick notes in a legible form, and not wait for a big hefty wordprocessor to open, or I don’t want hidden codes to format my text body.

There are a number of other such plain editors in Linux that use a graphical interface. The first time I installed Mandrake I discovered GEdit by Gnome. I liked it a lot right away. It reminded me of Textpad which I’d been using in windows, and I was instantly at home in it. Then I discovered KWrite and Kate which are part of the KDE desktop suite of programs. Presently I use Kate the most. It’s the first program I open in the morning for my journaling and writing hours, and it’s the last program I close at night. I usually have a row of tabs (files) open at once, and switch back and forth willy nilly, doing all I need to do except when I have to produce a formatted document for someone else.

Documents done up in a word processor will always have hidden codes for even the most basic punctuation. If I copy and paste those passages into a web page, I’m bound to have strange greek-looking symbols tossed into the page. Then I’m stuck with the unhappy job of going through the coding to find the punctuation marks and spaces, and doing them over in a plain text document.

Some people do all their web design from scratch in a text editor. I guess I still like the features of Quanta Plus best (it has Kate incorporated into it), but we can talk about that another time.

For now, don’t hesitate to try out various plain text editors. Sooner or later you’ll find one that fits you like a smart glove!