h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As good as Vi and Emacs are, they are generally limited to unix boxes. In the MS Windows and DOS you normally get notepad (a reasonable text editor in the windows) and edit (OK this is DOS 5.0 or greater but that's all I've got to go on).

There are others, but I can't remember too many of them or what systems they run on.

As far as VI goes, I am confident that you could find the editor for
your operating system in the list provided at
http://www.thomer.com/thomer/vi/vi.html
There are some links to tutorials as well...
I don't like to say it, but EMACS is available in source distribution
so chances are big that this source code already has been ported
(and even compiled) to your system
Though I would advise you to stick to VI, the only editor worth
mentioning. It is also the ubiquitous, the powerful, the ...
(insert anything positive you can think of)
A VI-fanatic... Palmgloss

I don't (generally) use those other operating systems - I work at an ISP and use FreeBSD during the day and then go online with Linux in the evenings . I just thought I'd point out that there are other text editors out there (I used to quite like textedit under open windows on Sun boxes for instance)

Anyway vi is .... well I'd better not say this is a family oriented site . I have just had to learn the the basics to get by here.

A non VI-fanatic, Phil

The problem of VI resides in your last sentence: VI is hard to learn, I agree on that, and if all one ever does is type text and simple search and replace actions, then it is just not worth the trouble, of course. But if a lot of text has to be typed, then the time you invest to learn VI properly will pay off, I'm sure, especially if you use it for programming purposes. I also used it to extract data from files with more than 1000 lines where I needed only 10 lines from... it worked just fine, but of course it took me some time to learn how to do it. I think most users do not distinguish between hard to learn and hard to use. VI is hard to learn, but not cumbersome in its use, while lots of "basic" editors require a lot of switching around between keyboard and mouse to get some jobs done.
Palmgloss