So you've graduated from webmonkey to mobile webmonkey. The good news is, you'll be able to build Web sites for fun or profit nearly anywhere. The bad news is that no two computers are alike, so there's no guarantee that your next location will have the HomeSite/CuteFTP or BBEdit/Fetch combo you're used to.
Face it: You may not always be able to work in your usual comfortable environment. You may be someplace where your text editor won't load, there's no mouse, or you're faced with a PC and you're a diehard Mac user. How do you maintain your mobility without dragging your own computer with you everywhere? Learn a Unix text editor. You'll be able to work with aplomb in a wide variety of situations - virtually anywhere, on any machine - and move on to a new level of Unix godliness.
There are three commonly used Unix text editors - pico, emacs, and vi. This week, I'll walk you through the basics of vi.
Pronounced "vee-eye," vi is a visual text editor for Unix, which means you can see the document you're editing or adding to, and it's the default editor for Unix systems. Since most telnet interfaces start off in a Unix shell, you can open and edit files without having to send them to your desktop and then back to the machine where they reside.
There are several things vi has going for it: Since it's the default on most Unix systems, it's ubiquitous. It's also small, fast, extremely powerful, and keyboard-based. If you're working with a slow connection or on a portable machine with no mouse and very little system memory, you'll still be able to create and edit files with ease.
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