Your "Home" directory can be seen in a few ways:
[me@linuxbox ~]$ echo $HOME
/home/me
The HOME variable on command line stores the absolute pathname of your home directory.
Table 11-1 shows some of the other interesting envrionment variables available in most Linux distributions. Some noteable ones are:
DISPLAY | Name of your display if you are running a graphical environment. Usually this is ":0", meaning the first display generated by the X server
EDITOR | Name of the program to be used for text editing
SHELL | Name of your home directory
PATH | Colon-separated list of directories searched when you enter the name of an executable program
PS1 | Prompt String 1. This defines the contents of the shell prompt and can be extensively customized
TERM | Name of your terminal type. Unix-like systems support many protocols; this variable sets the protocol to be used with your terminal emulator
Text editors are invoked on the command line. For example, if we want to use gedit, we can do:
[me@linuxbox ~]$ gedit some_file
Graphic text editors are pretty self-explanatory but there are a number of text-based editors available in the Linux environment.
One file you can practice editing is the .bashrc file
Always make sure to create a backup
You can see many of the available text editors here