edit a file named foo

[ pico foo ]
editing can be accomplished by a number of editors. To get pico you must install pine. Pine is a mail program; in the RedHat distro it is an rpm. Install Pine and you will have pico. If you are using Debian, nano is the editor similar to pico. In my opinion, vim and gvim are also very good editors. So to edit the file named foo you would do [ vim foo ]

or [ gvim foo ]

gvim works in xwindows and gives you a nice graphical interface. Vim and gvim have syntax highlighting which is configurable ( see vim colors ). Vim and Pico will work at the command line. This is by far only the tip of the iceberg as far as editors go.