I am still a little confused about the use of the wildcard character (*). Is my understanding correct that if, for example, I wanted an "ls" command for all .txt files, putting an asterisk before the .txt would print all .txt files within the directory that I am currently within? Does the wildcard asterisk do this matching based on type, like recognizing that they are all .txt files, or does it just check for things that have any of the characters within ".txt" within them? Thank you for clarifying!

when would we want to use a wildcard character

Does the wildcard character work to replace /? Or just characters

What does "recursively removes the directory tree" mean? Does it mean to delete all the files in the directory tree?

One of the commands that was listed on the reading was ls -l, and I was wondering what the difference between ls -l and just ls is. It seems like -l just gives you more information?

In what cases do you still use vim or Emacs today?