What is a Text Editor?

One question that is frequently asked is “What is a text editor?”

Text editors are editing tools that software developers generally include in other software packages or operating systems, though there are some stand-alone formats. There are a number of text editors available today.

For example, the basic Windows version text editors are Notepad and Wordpad. Edit is a text editor for MS DOS, VI is for Unix and SimpleText is for Macintosh.

Edit Plus is a stand alone text editor that users can download from the internet. It is used by many programmers because it has syntax highlighting features, it’s quick and easy to use, and it works as an HTML editor as well as with various other programming languages including Java, JavaScript, C/C++, Perl, ASP, PHP and CSS.

A text editor is not as powerful as desktop publishing or word processing software such as Microsoft Word because they are limited in regard to formatting functions although some are capable of table creation.

Text editors are a good source for editing web based page content and html documents in the development mode because they do not automatically format text or create a command like some word processors do.

For instance, if you make a document that will be viewed on the web and you put in the URL that would be typed into the address bar at the top of the screen in a browser, Word would recognize that the text is a URL and would automatically create a hyperlink in the document. In a text editor, this would not occur automatically.

Text editors are most useful for creating and editing the source file for web pages. Existing web pages are often modified using a text editor.

// posted by BasicMichelle on 11/04/2005 08:00:00 AM / Permanent Link