A text editor is a type of program Application software, also known as software application, application or app, is computer software designed to help the user to perform singular or multiple related specific tasks. Typical examples are word processors, spreadsheets, media players and database applications used for editing plain text files A text file is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines. A text file exists within a computer file system. The end of a text file is often denoted by placing one or more special characters, known as an end-of-file marker, after the last line in a text file.

Text editors are often provided with operating systems An operating system is the software on a computer that manages the way different programs use its hardware, and regulates the ways that a user controls the computer. Operating systems are found on almost any device that contains a computer with multiple programs—from cellular phones and video game consoles to supercomputers and web servers. Some or software development packages, and can be used to change configuration files In computing, configuration files, or config files configure the initial settings for some computer programs. They are used for user applications, server processes and operating system settings. The files are often written in ASCII and line-oriented, with lines terminated by a newline or carriage return/line feed pair, depending on the operating and programming language A programming language is an artificial language designed to express computations that can be performed by a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine, to express algorithms precisely, or as a mode of human communication source code In computer science, source code is any collection of statements or declarations written in some human-readable computer programming language. Source code is the means most often used by programmers to specify the actions to be performed by a computer.

Plain text files vs. word processor files

There are important differences between plain text files created by a text editor, and document A document , is a bounded physical or digital representation of a body of information designed with the capacity (and usually intent) to communicate. A document may manifest symbolic, diagrammatic or sensory-representational information. To document (verb) is to produce a document artifact by collecting and representing information. In files created by word processors A word processor is a computer application used for the production (including composition, editing, formatting, and possibly printing) of any sort of printable material such as Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor designed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS , the Apple Macintosh (1984), the AT&T Unix PC (1985), Atari ST (1986), SCO UNIX, OS/2, and Microsoft Windows (, WordPerfect WordPerfect is a proprietary word processing application, now owned by Corel. Bruce Bastian, a Brigham Young University graduate student, and BYU computer science professor Dr. Alan Ashton joined forces to design a word processing system for the city of Orem's Data General Corp. minicomputer system in 1979. Bastian and Ashton kept the rights to, or OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org, commonly known as OOo or OpenOffice, is an open-source software application suite available for a number of different computer operating systems. It is distributed as free software and written using its own GUI toolkit. It supports the ISO/IEC standard OpenDocument Format for data interchange as its default file format, as well as. Briefly:

• A plain text file is represented and edited by showing all the characters as they are present in the file. The only characters usable for 'mark-up' are the control characters In computing and telecommunication, a control character or non-printing character is a code point in a character set, that does not in itself represent a written symbol. It is in-band signaling in the context of character encoding. All entries in the ASCII table below code 32 (technically the C0 control code set) and 127 are of this kind, of the used character set A character encoding system consists of a code that pairs each character from a given repertoire with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the transmission of data through telecommunication networks or storage of text in computers; in practice this is newline, tab and formfeed. The most commonly used character set is ASCII The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text. Most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, though they support many more characters than did ASCII, especially recently, as plain text files are more often being used for programming and configuration, and less frequently for documentation (e.g. detailed instructions, user guides) than in the past.
• Documents created by a word processor generally contain fileformat-specific "control characters In computing and telecommunication, a control character or non-printing character is a code point in a character set, that does not in itself represent a written symbol. It is in-band signaling in the context of character encoding. All entries in the ASCII table below code 32 (technically the C0 control code set) and 127 are of this kind," beyond what is defined in the character set. They enable functions like bold, italic, fonts, columns, tables, etc. These and other common page formatting symbols were once associated only with desktop publishing Desktop publishing combines a personal computer and WYSIWYG page layout software to create publication documents on a computer for either large scale publishing or small scale local multifunction peripheral output and distribution, but are now commonplace in the simplest word processor.
• Word processor programs can usually edit a plain text file and save it back in the plain text file format. However, one must take care to tell the program that this is what is wanted. Specifying the save format is especially important in cases such as source code, HTML, and configuration and control files. If left to the program's default, the file will contain those "special characters" unique to the word processor's file format, and will not be handled correctly by the utility the files were intended for.

History

Before text editors existed, computer text was punched into punched cards A punched card is a piece of stiff paper that contains digital information represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Now almost an obsolete recording medium, punched cards were widely used throughout the 19th century for controlling textile looms and in the late 19th and early 20th century for operating fairground with keypunch A keypunch is a device for manually entering data into punched cards by precisely punching holes at locations designated by the keys struck by the operator. Early keypunches were manual devices. Later keypunches were mechanized, often resembled a small desk, with a keyboard similar to a typewriter, and with hoppers for blank cards and stackers for machines. The text was carried as a physical box of these thin cardboard cards, and read into a card-reader.

The first text editors were line editors oriented on typewriter A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with a set of keys that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper. From their invention before 1870 through much of the 20th century, typewriters were indispensable tools for many professional writers and in business offices. By the end of the 1980s, word style terminals and they did not provide a window or screen-oriented display. They usually had very short commands (to minimize typing) that reproduced the current line. Among them were a command to print a selected section(s) of the file on the typewriter (or printer In computing, a printer is a peripheral which produces a hard copy of documents stored in electronic form, usually on physical print media such as paper or transparencies. Many printers are primarily used as local peripherals, and are attached by a printer cable or, in most newer printers, a USB cable to a computer which serves as a document) in case of necessity. An "edit cursor", an imaginary insertion point, could be moved by special commands that operated with line numbers of specific text strings In mathematical logic, more precisely in the theory of formal languages, and in computer science, a string is a sequence of symbols that are chosen from a set or alphabet.[citation needed] (context). Later, the context strings were extended to regular expressions In computing, regular expressions, also referred to as regex or regexp, provide a concise and flexible means for matching strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters. A regular expression is written in a formal language that can be interpreted by a regular expression processor, a program that either serves as a. To see the changes, the file needed to be printed on the printer. These "line-based text editors" were considered revolutionary improvements over keypunch machines. In case typewriter-based terminals were not available, they were adapted to keypunch equipment. In this case the user needed to punch the commands into the separate deck of cards and feed them into the computer in order to edit the file.

When computer terminals A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that is used for entering data into, and displaying data from, a computer or a computing system. Early terminals were inexpensive devices but very slow compared to punched cards or paper tape for input, but as the technology improved and video displays were introduced, with video screens became available, screen-based text editors became common. One of the earliest "full screen" editors was O26 - which was written for the operator console of the CDC 6000 series The CDC 6000 series was a family of mainframe computers manufactured by Control Data Corporation in the 1960s. It consisted of CDC 6400, CDC 6500, CDC 6600 and CDC 6700 computers, which all were extremely rapid and efficient for their time. Each was a large, solid-state, general-purpose, digital computer that performed scientific and business data machines in 1967. Another early full screen editor is vi vi is a family of screen-oriented text editors which share certain characteristics, such as methods of invocation from the operating system command interpreter, and characteristic user interface features. The portable subset of the behavior of vi programs, and the ex editor language supported within these programs, is described by the Single Unix. Written in the 1970s, vi is still a standard editor^[1] for Unix Unix is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna. Today's Unix systems are split into various branches, developed over time by AT&T as well as various commercial vendors and non-profit and Linux Linux refers to the family of Unix-like computer operating systems using the Linux kernel. Linux can be installed on a wide variety of computer hardware, ranging from mobile phones, tablet computers and video game consoles, to mainframes and supercomputers. Linux is predominantly known for its use in servers; in 2009 it held a server market share operating systems. The productivity of editing using full-screen editors (compared to the line-based editors) motivated many of the early purchases of video terminals.

Types of text editors

Some text editors are small and simple, while others offer a broad and complex range of functionality. For example, Unix Unix is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna. Today's Unix systems are split into various branches, developed over time by AT&T as well as various commercial vendors and non-profit and Unix-like operating systems have the vi vi is a family of screen-oriented text editors which share certain characteristics, such as methods of invocation from the operating system command interpreter, and characteristic user interface features. The portable subset of the behavior of vi programs, and the ex editor language supported within these programs, is described by the Single Unix editor (or a variant), but many also include the Emacs Emacs is a class of feature-rich text editors, usually characterized by their extensibility. Emacs has, perhaps, more editing commands than other editors, numbering over 1,000 commands. It also allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work editor. Microsoft Windows Microsoft Windows is a series of software operating systems and graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. Microsoft first introduced an operating environment named Windows in November 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal systems come with the very simple Notepad Notepad is a simple text editor for Microsoft Windows. It has been included in all versions of Microsoft Windows since Windows 1.0 in 1985, though many people—especially programmers—prefer to use one of many other Windows text editors with more features. Under Apple Macintosh The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface rather than a command-line interface's classic Mac OS Mac OS is the trademark-protected name for a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface. The original form of what Apple would later name the "Mac OS" was the there was the native SimpleText SimpleText is the native text editor for the Classic Mac OS. SimpleText allows editing including text formatting , fonts, and sizes. It can be considered similar to Windows' WordPad application. In later versions it also gained additional read only display capabilities for PICT files, as well as other Mac OS built-in formats like Quickdraw GX and, which was replaced under OSX by TextEdit TextEdit is a simple, open source word processor and text editor, first featured in NeXT's NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. It is now distributed with Mac OS X since Apple Inc.'s acquisition of NeXT, and available as a GNUstep application for other Unix-compatible operating systems such as Linux. It is powered by Apple Advanced Typography and has many. Some editors, such as WordStar WordStar was a text-based word processing program, meaning that it worked with files that were essentially text, with markup language-like formatting commands ; this made the files relatively small. By contrast, most word processors today are code-based, and save their documents in much larger files, have dual operating modes allowing them to be either a text editor or a word processor.

Text editors geared for professional computer users place no limit on the size of the file being opened. In particular, they start quickly even when editing large files, and are capable of editing files that are too large to fit the computer's main memory. Simpler text editors often just read files into an array in RAM Random-access memory is a form of computer data storage. Today, it takes the form of integrated circuits that allow stored data to be accessed in any order (i.e., at random). "Random" refers to the idea that any piece of data can be returned in a constant time, regardless of its physical location and whether or not it is related to the. On larger files this is a slow process, and very large files often do not fit.

The ability to read and write very large files is needed by many professional computer users. For example, system administrators may need to read long log files. Programmers may need to change large source code In computer science, source code is any collection of statements or declarations written in some human-readable computer programming language. Source code is the means most often used by programmers to specify the actions to be performed by a computer files, or examine unusually large texts, such as an entire dictionary placed in a single file.

Some text editors include specialized computer languages to customize the editor (programmable editors). For example, Emacs can be customized by programming in Lisp Lisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized syntax. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today; only Fortran is older. Like Fortran, Lisp has changed a great deal since its early days, and a number of dialects have. These usually permit the editor to simulate the keystroke combinations and features of other editors, so that users do not have to learn the native command combinations.

Another important group of programmable editors use REXX REXX is an interpreted programming language which was developed at IBM. It is a structured high-level programming language which was designed to be both easy to learn and easy to read. Both proprietary and open source interpreters for REXX are available on a wide range of computing platforms, and compilers are available for IBM mainframes as their scripting language. These editors permit entering both commands and REXX statements directly in the command line at the bottom of the screen (can be hidden and activated by a keystroke). These editors are usually referred to as "orthodox editors", and most representatives of this class are derivatives of XEDIT, IBM's editor for VM/CMS. Among them are THE, Kedit, SlickEdit SlickEdit is a cross-platform commercial source code editor by SlickEdit, Inc. SlickEdit provides syntax highlighting, code navigation and customizable keyboard shortcuts. Versions from 2007 and later also support programmable code templates, X2, Uni-edit, UltraEdit, and Sedit. Some vi derivatives such as Vim Vim is a text editor released by Bram Moolenaar in 1991 for the Amiga computer. The name "Vim" is an acronym for "Vi IMproved" because Vim was created as an extended version of the vi editor, with many additional features designed to be helpful in editing program source code also support folding as well as macro languages, and have a command line at the bottom for entering commands. They can be considered another branch of the family of orthodox editors.

Many text editors for software developers include source code syntax highlighting Syntax highlighting is a feature of some text editors that display text—especially source code—in different colors and fonts according to the category of terms. This feature eases writing in a structured language such as a programming language or a markup language as both structures and syntax errors are visually distinct. Highlighting does and automatic completion to make programs easier to read and write. Programming editors often permit one to select the name of a subprogram or variable, and then jump to its definition and back. Often an auxiliary utility like ctags is used to locate the definitions.

Typical features

• String searching algorithm String searching algorithms, sometimes called string matching algorithms, are an important class of string algorithms that try to find a place where one or several strings are found within a larger string or text – search string with a replacement string. Different methods are employed, Global(ly) Search And Replace, Conditional Search and Replace, Unconditional Search and Replace.
• Cut, copy, and paste – most text editors provide methods to duplicate and move text within the file, or between files.
• Text formatting – Text editors often provide basic formatting features like line wrap, auto-indentation Some languages are written right-to-left, and if indentation is used, in the above "left" and "right" should of course be swapped when referring to such languages, bullet list formatting, comment formatting In computer programming, a comment is a programming language construct used to embed programmer-readable annotations in the source code of a computer program. Those annotations are potentially significant to programmers but typically ignorable to compilers and interpreters. Comments are usually added with the purpose of making the source code, and so on.
• Undo and redo Undo is a command in many computer programs. It erases the last change done to the document reverting it to an older state. In some more advanced programs such as graphic processing, undo will negate the last command done to the file being edited – As with word processors, text editors will provide a way to undo and redo the last edit. Often—especially with older text editors—there is only one level of edit history remembered and successively issuing the undo command will only "toggle" the last change. Modern or more complex editors usually provide a multiple level history such that issuing the undo command repeatedly will revert the document to successively older edits. A separate redo command will cycle the edits "forward" toward the most recent changes. The number of changes remembered depends upon the editor and is often configurable by the user.
• Data transformation Data element to data element mapping is frequently complicated by complex transformations that require one-to-many and many-to-one transformation rules – Reading or merging the contents of another text file into the file currently being edited. Some text editors provide a way to insert the output of a command issued to the operating system's shell.
• Filtering – Some advanced text editors allow the editor to send all or sections of the file being edited to another utility and read the result back into the file in place of the lines being "filtered". This, for example, is useful for sorting a series of lines alphabetically or numerically, doing mathematical computations, and so on.
• Syntax highlighting – contextually highlights software code and other text that appears in an organized or predictable format.

Specialised editors

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

• Source code editors are text editors with additional functionality to facilitate the production of source code. These often feature user-programmable syntax highlighting, and coding tools or keyboard macros similar to an HTML editor (see below).
• Folding editors. This subclass includes so-called "orthodox editors" that are derivatives of Xedit. The specialized version of folding is usually called outlining (see below).
• IDEs (integrated development environments) are designed to manage and streamline larger programming projects. They are usually only used for programming as they contain many features unnecessary for simple text editing.
• World Wide Web programmers are offered a variety of text editors dedicated to the task of web development. These create the plain text files that deliver web pages. HTML editors include: Dreamweaver, E (text editor), Microsoft FrontPage, HotDog, Homesite, Nvu, Tidy, and GoLive. Many offer the option of viewing a work in progress on a built-in web browser. XML editors share many traits.
• Mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists often produce articles and books using TeX or LaTeX in plain text files. Such documents are often produced by a standard text editor, but some people use specialized TeX editors.
• Outliners. Also called tree-based editors, because they combine a hierarchical outline tree with an text editor. Folding (see above) can generally be considered a generalized form of outlining.

See also

• Collaborative editor
• Comparison of text editors
• Editor war
• File viewer – does not change file, faster for very large files
• Hex editor – used for editing binary files
• Stream editor – used for non-interactive editing
• List of text editors

Notes

1. ^ "The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6, IEEE Std 1003.1, 2004 Edition". The IEEE and The Open Group. 2004. http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/vi.html. Retrieved January 18, 2010.

External links

• Text editor info for beginners at text-editor.org
• The text editor wiki
• Orthodox Editors as a Special Class of Advanced Editors, discusses Xedit and its clones with an emphasis of folding capabilities and programmability.

Categories: Text editors | Technical communication tools

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