You will almost definitely encounter editors at some point as you modify text files. If you use pine for e-mail, you will get familiar with the editor pico. pico is a very simple editor well-suited for small jobs. Larger projects (heavy-duty programming for instance) are better left to more powerful editors such as xemacs. Note that xemacs can only be used in an X-windows environment. vi and emacs are other, older editors that aren't quite as intuitive to use. Most of the X-windows environments also have their own fairly easy-to-use editors (kedit in KDE for example).