Brian Masinick

Authored Comments

IF you are using a UNIX or Linux system, and you are DEFINITELY going to rebuild it, or ERASE and rebuild it, here is a rather quick way to render that system unusable UNTIL you reinstall or build something else.

Become the root user, then run the command rm -fr /

What you'll do is go to the topmost directory and remove EVERYTHING under it; technically it doesn't do a "WIPE"; practically speaking though, it removes the ENTIRE system with a SINGLE command.

Like I said, you better mean it when you run this one because you'll have to create another system in it's place!

I echo Oliverjames; it would be helpful to not only mention the tools you use (and perhaps a sentence); it'd be nice to show 2 or 3 specifics in which each tool helped you.

For instance, with vi, it's very handy to use modal commands, several of which are right on the fingers of typists who keep their fingers on the home keys with their left and right hands.

I was interested in what you were doing with Gedit and asciidoc, but I didn't really get a good idea why Gedit, versus vi or any other text editor made working with this tool handy - can you share some details?

With LibreOffice, I'm aware that it supports both the de-facto formats used by Microsoft Office and the industry standard formats that were introduced to provide standard formats NOT tied to or owned by proprietary vendors, such as Microsoft or Apple. My example is that for years (prior to retirement), I've used LibreOffice to create and update my resumes; just to be sure they WORK, I've borrowed or used systems with Microsoft Office to make sure they're readable there PLUS accessible to those who use UNIX, Linux, and Apple Mac or iOS, Android, in other words, readable across most commonly available resources today.

LibreOffice is not quite a 100% perfect replication of Office in every regard, but it's been very good as an interoperable tool, certainly able to exchange both written documents and simple spreadsheets.

Regarding editors, yes, I've used vi and vim for a long time, but during my software development and maintenance days, I often used Emacs, specifically the currently available GNU Emacs, to do most of my coding and maintenance testing.

For quick editing of plain text with very little formatting and only simple corrections, something like nano is just as fast and requires little understanding to type and make simple corrections.

A much lighter alternative to Emacs, but a programming tool nevertheless, Geany is a fantastic graphical editor. It can recognize many programming languages for indentation and matching brackets or parentheses, so it's useful for such things.

Finally, for those who do a LOT with XML and similar tagged resources, while Geany, Emacs, or Vi *could* do the job,(and they have colors and other mechanisms for matching, something like Notepad++ - some Linux distributions even have another alternative: notepadqq, which is similar.

Anyway, my point is that the overall ecosystem, regardless of which operating system or user environment you prefer to use, has plenty of useful editing tools; most of them are quite mature, and we can all explain endlessly why we like certain ones; having to use multiple free and proprietary systems, I've found that there really are useful editing tools on most of them and a few of them are present across several systems!