The "edit" command is a symlink to either the Pico editor in cLIeNUX, or fpted. pico is feature-lean, and quite intuitive. The few features it does have are well chosen. It doesn't have much in the way of text-processing features. For example, it has search, but not continuous find-and-replace. I'm using pico now. pico DOES have enough features to warrant a good read of the seedoc. The + switch is handy, for example.
fpted is smaller, a bit more featureful, and has "hanging indents".
When you get into text-processing type editing, with fancy bulk manipulations of text and multiple buffers and so on, unix editing tradition goes back to the ed editor. ed has a very powerful set of text manipulation commands, couched in a line-oriented interface that would work on a paper teletype terminal or punchcard machine. Due to it's prepotence (no, that's not a typo) upon unix text utilities, the 1971 AT&T UNIX Programmer's Manual page on ed is included in cLIeNUX Core. Thanks to Dennis Ritchie for posting said document on his personal webpage, and saying he had no problem mith me using a few pages here. So your interactive text editing options in cLIeNUX Core are either pico or fpted as edit and ed.
Other commands that are not interactive editors are also descended of ed commands. Unix/ed text wildcard strings are called "regular expressions". If you abbreviate "regular expression" as RE, the ed command for what the grep command does would be g/RE/p , "global regular-expression print". The sed command is described as a stream editor. I think really "sed" is short for scriptable ed. I point all this out because unix documentation unfortunately has a unix-specific lingo to it, and ed is where a lot of that lingo comes from. So learning an ed family editor will help you generally with unix, and much more easily than the other big source of opaque unix lingo, the C programming language.
Unix has a lot of commands for manipulating text files that aren't editors per se. cat -s removes extra blank lines from a file, tr does charachter translations, cut truncates lines by various parameters, and many more. Have a look in /command/WHATIS for what's available in cLIeNUX Core.
RIGHTS
This file copyright 1999 Richard Allen Hohensee and is released for redistribution only as part of cLIeNUX as a whole.