Both OpenOffice and Microsoft Office 2000 (Word, Excel and Powerpoint) are available on the linux systems. You can find these programs either in the KDE/Gnome start menus, or you can run them from the command line using the commands winword, excel or powerpnt (or the OpenOffice equivalents oowriter, oocalc,ooimpress).

Several editors are available, including vi, emacs, XEmacs, nedit, and pico. If you are using an X-windows (graphics) terminal, We recommend two editors: NEdit and XEmacs. NEdit is probably the simplist one to start with.

To edit a text file, type the name of the editor you want followed by the name of the file. For example:

nedit letter.txt

If the file is found in the current directory, the editor will open it for editing, otherwise it will create a new file.

• Nedit home page and documentation

For more advanced users, xemacs is a powerful editor with many features, such as special formatting of programming languages.

• XEmacs home page and documentation

Users who are used to the traditional Unix editor vi may like to try an enhanced version, vim (or gvim for the graphical version).

You can set the default editor for your account by setting the environment variable EDITOR. For most users, the correct way to do this is to add the line (for example):

setenv EDITOR nedit

in your accounts .cshrc file.

After this takes effect, other programs which invoke editors (for example, when composing a mail message in mutt) will use your preferred editor rather than the default vi.