ed is a line editor for Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It was one of the first parts of the Unix operating system that was developed, in August 1969. It remains part of the POSIX and Open Group standards for Unix-based operating systems, alongside the more sophisticated full-screen editor vi.
A file manager or file browser is a computer program that provides a user interface to manage files and folders. The most common operations performed on files or groups of files include creating, opening, renaming, copying, moving, deleting and searching for files, as well as modifying file attributes, properties and file permissions. Folders and files may be displayed in a hierarchical tree based on their directory structure.
A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. An example of such program is "notepad" software. Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be used to change files such as configuration files, documentation files and programming language source code.
vi is a screen-oriented text editor originally created for the Unix operating system. The portable subset of the behavior of vi and programs based on it, and the ex editor language supported within these programs, is described by the Single Unix Specification and POSIX.
A word processor is an electronic device for text, composing, editing, formatting, and printing.
A terminal emulator, or terminal application, is a computer program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture. Though typically synonymous with a shell or text terminal, the term terminal covers all remote terminals, including graphical interfaces. A terminal emulator inside a graphical user interface is often called a terminal window.
Desktop publishing (DTP) is the creation of documents using dedicated software on a personal ("desktop") computer. It was first used almost exclusively for print publications, but now it also assists in the creation of various forms of online content. Desktop publishing software can generate page layouts and produce text and image content comparable to the simpler forms of traditional typography and printing. This technology allows individuals, businesses, and other organizations to self-publish a wide variety of content, from menus to magazines to books, without the expense of commercial printing.
Genera is a commercial operating system and integrated development environment for Lisp machines created by Symbolics. It is essentially a fork of an earlier operating system originating on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) AI Lab's Lisp machines which Symbolics had used in common with Lisp Machines, Inc. (LMI), and Texas Instruments (TI). Genera was also sold by Symbolics as Open Genera, which runs Genera on computers based on a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Alpha processor using Tru64 UNIX. In 2021 a new version was released as Portable Genera which runs on Tru64 UNIX on Alpha, Linux on x86-64 and Arm64 Linux, and macOS on x86-64 and Arm64. It is released and licensed as proprietary software.
Cut, copy, and paste are essential commands of modern human–computer interaction and user interface design. They offer an interprocess communication technique for transferring data through a computer's user interface. The cut command removes the selected data from its original position, and the copy command creates a duplicate; in both cases the selected data is kept in temporary storage called the clipboard. Clipboard data is later inserted wherever a paste command is issued. The data remains available to any application supporting the feature, thus allowing easy data transfer between applications.
GNU TeXmacs is a scientific word processor and typesetting component of the GNU Project. It originated as a variant of GNU Emacs with TeX functionalities, though it shares no code with those programs, while using TeX fonts. It is written and maintained by Joris van der Hoeven and a group of developers. The program produces structured documents with a WYSIWYG user interface. New document styles can be created by the user. The editor provides high-quality typesetting algorithms and TeX and other fonts for publishing professional looking documents.
In computer programming, standard streams are preconnected input and output communication channels between a computer program and its environment when it begins execution. The three input/output (I/O) connections are called standard input (stdin), standard output (stdout) and standard error (stderr). Originally I/O happened via a physically connected system console, but standard streams abstract this. When a command is executed via an interactive shell, the streams are typically connected to the text terminal on which the shell is running, but can be changed with redirection or a pipeline. More generally, a child process inherits the standard streams of its parent process.
A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that can be used for entering data into, and transcribing data from, a computer or a computing system. Most early computers only had a front panel to input or display bits and had to be connected to a terminal to print or input text through a keyboard. Teleprinters were used as early-day hard-copy terminals and predated the use of a computer screen by decades. The computer would typically transmit a line of data which would be printed on paper, and accept a line of data from a keyboard over a serial or other interface. Starting in the mid-1970s with microcomputers such as the Sphere 1, Sol-20, and Apple I, display circuitry and keyboards began to be integrated into personal and workstation computer systems, with the computer handling character generation and outputting to a CRT display such as a computer monitor or, sometimes, a consumer TV, but most larger computers continued to require terminals.
In computing, text-based user interfaces (TUI), is a retronym describing a type of user interface (UI) common as an early form of human–computer interaction, before the advent of bitmapped displays and modern conventional graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Like modern GUIs, they can use the entire screen area and may accept mouse and other inputs. They may also use color and often structure the display using box-drawing characters such as ┌ and ╣. The modern context of use is usually a terminal emulator.
Backspace is the keyboard key that in typewriters originally pushed the carriage one position backwards, and in modern computer systems typically moves the display cursor one position backwards, deletes the character at that position, and shifts back any text after that position by one character.
XEDIT is a visual editor for VM/CMS using block mode IBM 3270 terminals.
A console application or command-line program is a computer program designed to be used via a text-only user interface, such as a text terminal, the command-line interface of some operating systems or the text-based interface included with most graphical user interface (GUI) operating systems, such as the Windows Console in Microsoft Windows, the Terminal in macOS, and xterm in Unix.
GNU Emacs is a free software tool and text editor that also features web browsers, a file manager, note-taking software, multiple IRC clients, and more. It was created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems. GNU Emacs has been a central component of the GNU project and a flagship project of the free software movement.
Emacs, originally named EMACS, is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor". Development of the first Emacs began in the mid-1970s, and work on GNU Emacs, directly descended from the original, is ongoing; its latest version is 29.4, released June 2024.
In computing, a script is a relatively short and simple set of instructions that typically automate an otherwise manual process. The act of writing a script is called scripting. Scripting language or script language describes a programming language that is used for scripting.
A command-line interface (CLI) is a means of interacting with a computer program by inputting lines of text called command-lines. Command-line interfaces emerged in the mid-1960s, on computer terminals, as an interactive and more user-friendly alternative to the non-interactive interface available with punched cards.
