Text Editors
A text editor is one of the most fundamental tools on the computer. As its name implies, it allows one to edit text, very often as a way of writing source code in computer programming.
A text editor is not a word processor like Microsoft's Word or Google's Docs. Text editors work with pure text, and have no ability to "make things look pretty" like a word processor does. There are no superscripts or subscripts, no underlining, no bold, and no italics.
The advantage to a text editor is that it handles unformatted plain text, which is easier for both computers and programmers to work with.
Terminal-based text editors
Because the text editor is such an important tool there are a lot of editors to choose from. Some of them run as programs on an operating system that you can use from within a Terminal. These have the advantage of allowing one to log in to a server and work on files from within that machine, although they tend to be operated only via the keyboard, and their commands can be a bit arcane. The most common terminal-based editors include emacs, vim, and nano (or pico).
If you'd like to experiment with using a terminal-based text editor, you can try out using nano.
Text editor applications
There are also text editor applications that have been developed to run on Windows, Apple, and Linux operating systems. These applications are written specifically for each operating system, although some developers write their text editors to be "cross-platform": there are versions of the software that work on multiple operating systems.
Some options:
- Windows:
- Notepad (comes installed)
- Notepad++
- macOS:
- TextEdit (comes installed)
- BBEdit
- Linux
- gEdit (may or may not be installed
- Cross-platform editors
Using a Text Editor application on your local machine
You'll probably feel more comfortable editing text using an application, where you're free to use your mouse to move around in the window, and standard drop-down menus are available to assist in saving files, changing preferences, setting up color themes, etc.
My preferred text editor application is Visual Studio Code, which you can learn about installing and customizing here or in this Introduction to VS Code [YouTube].
IMPORTANT: Setting Editor Preferences
As you might expect for such a powerful tool, text editors need to be configured so that you can use them most efficiently for what you need to do. Regardless of which editor you're using, you'll want to make sure that it is configured as follows:
- Auto-expand tabs to 4 spaces
- Word-wrap to window
How exactly one sets these preferences depends on the editor, but look around in the Preferences settings and you should find it. If not, check with another student or the instructor.
Happy text editing!