Text editor: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

A text editor is a piece of computer software for editing plain text. It is distinguished from a word processor in that it does not manage document formatting or other features commonly used in desktop publishing.

Text editors are often bundled with operating systems or software development packages, and are commonly used for editing operating system and application configuration files and programming language source code. Some text editors are small and simple, while others offer a broad and complex range of functionality. For example, Unix and Unix-like operating systems have the vi editor (or a variant), but many also include the Emacs editor to edit text as well. Microsoft Windows systems come with the very simple Notepad, though many people (especially programmers) use a more complete program like TextPad. For the Apple Macintosh's Mac OS there is the native SimpleText, which was replaced or supplemented by WorldText, and also the HTML editor BBEdit. Windows and Mac OS ports of Emacs also exist.

An important characteristic of the more powerful text editors is capacity to work with files of arbitrary size. For example, the regular Notepad will generally load the file to RAM and require three times its size, resulting in long loading times for large files. This is generally not a problem for the majority of users, but it is unacceptable for specialized uses by developers, such as for reading long log files or for examining naturally large texts, such as an entire dictionary placed in a single file. There are text editors geared specifically for the developer community that place no limit on the size of the file being opened. With them opening a huge file will only result in a slowdown due to slow access to disk, since the editor possibly is not able to load the entire file into RAM.

Some editors include special features and extra functions, for instance,

• Source code editors
• IDEs
• HTML editors
• Outliners

are packages with text editors included, usually with extra functionality. Many text editors geared for the developer community include source code syntax highlighting functionality for many programming languages.

List of popular text editors

• BBEdit [1]
• ed
• Edit application
• edlin
• edt
• Emacs (see also XEmacs, below)
• gEdit
• GNU Nano [2]
• jEdit
• joe [3]
• Kate
• NEdit [4]
• Notepad
• pico
• qed
• Red (a VAX/VMS editor, written in Forth variant STOIC)
• sam
• SimpleText
• SubEthaEdit
• TECO
• TextEdit
• TPU
• UltraEdit
• vi
• vim [5]
• XEmacs

• Beaver [6]
• EditPad lite [7]
• Editplus [8]
• EDXOR [9]
• Extreme pad [10]
• Metapad - exact duplication of Notepad's feature set with many additional features. [11]
• Netpadd [12]
• NoteTab [13]
• SciTE [14] - Features: designed for editing source code. Supports syntax coloring, more.
• TextPad
• Win32Pad [15]
• ConTEXT [16]
• Archnophilia [17]
• Yudit [18]

See also: Editor wars