When I try to be familiar to command line, I always need a simple and good editor, of course vi is great but I always find myself unable to save the opened file or save my changes, I always forget the shortcut keys, I find a very good editor called nano. nano has all basic operations of opening, editing and saving your changes, what is really cool is the status bar has all necessary shortcuts, have a look at the attached image.
I am using nano on Ubuntu (it is installed by default), also I use it on Cygwin, it is not installed by default there so I installed it manually. So now I enjoy editing files from the console, no more suffering 🙂
To make nano my default editor instead of vi, edit your .bash_profile
$nano ~/.bash_profile
Scroll to the end of file using Page-Down and add the line:
export EDITOR=nano
Congratulation, nano will make your life much easier, have a look at nano website: http://www.nano-editor.org/
From ahm507.blogspot.com