Technical Communication Tools - Text Editors

Text Editors

Lightweight text editors are very useful tools. While many word processors can be used to edit text, specialised text editors generally have features for handling text that word processors don't have. Additionally, files saved from a word processing program will often have added data and thus will not work if the file is to be loaded into an external program for processing.

Common text editors are Notepad by Microsoft, the Open Source Notepad++ and cross-platform editors such as vim or Emacs.

TextEdit is included in the utilities suite of Mac OS X. Other text editors used for the Macintosh platform are BBEdit, which is a paid-product, and its lighter weight freeware sibling, TextWrangler, both from Bare Bones Software.

Most users of Linux or Unix machines come down on one side of the Emacs vs. vi debate as to their favourite choice of text editor.

For Haiku machines the default Pe (short for Programmers editor) is simple and powerful and usually provides all the necessary functionality in one program, thus fitting with the Haiku philosophy.

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