Talk:Text editor

Early discussions
What I was trying to say was that the typical text editor is quite small and simple compared to the typical word processor; think Notepad and Word, vi and StarOffice. Even VIM is tight and small compared to, say, AbiWord. Emacs is something of an outlier, so I don't consider it a typical example. --LDC


 * Yes, but you could also contrast vi and Notepad in terms of complexity and feature set; Notepad has all of maybe 10 commands, vi has dozens if not hundreds. I haven't used AbiWord to know how it compares to Vim, but I've used Vim enough to regard it as quite complex. At any rate, I'm taking Notepad out of the list of "complex editors". I would substitute WordPad, but it typically saves to RTF format instead of plaintext. --Wesley

WordPad isn't a text editor at all, it's a word processor. Notepad is a text editor, and that's exactly what the text said.

"Plain text" is a term of art with a specific meaning; "ASCII" doesn't clarify that, and in fact would be wrong on non-ASCII machines. --LDC

Yes, yes, text editors can be complex. The article says that, and I don't disagree. They are, however, typically small and simple, and many people prefer small and simple ones, and that's an important characteristic. They do not, however, "typically" lack formatting features of word processors, they almost universally lack those features, and for good reason. --LDC

Actually the list of links to editors needs to be rewritten. There are quite some editors like emacs etc which are platform independent in the sense, that there exist different versions for each platform. --HJH

The link for PFE (under Windows text editors) is now dead. Should there be something in the article about the fact that text editors as a class of applications typically predate all other classes of PC applications? --Anthropic42

I asked this question at talk:qed text editor but no one seems to know the answer : Does anyone know the expansion of QED and how QED is pronounced ? Jay 14:18, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

list
can we change the list into a table and have checkboxes for OSes and such? i checked the licenses but forgot to check OSes. i think a table would be very nice. - Omegatron 16:01, Dec 6, 2004 (UTC)

various aspects should be color coded like Comparison of instant messengers

{Removed as it has been implemented}

if you think it's a good idea, add more info - Omegatron 19:51, Dec 7, 2004 (UTC)


 * i guess no one thinks so? - Omegatron 14:35, Dec 29, 2004 (UTC)


 * Done in Comparison of text editors. --Minghong 16:14, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

editors
I one of the opening paragraphs "E" as a "more powerful erditor". I have never heard of this proprietary Windows based editor and I am pretty sure emacs and vi users haven't either.

I added "NEdit" as another example of a powerful programmers text editor since quite alot of unix and Windows programmers will have heard of NEdit and know it as a good example of a powerful programmers text editor.

There is also a Wikipedia page on it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.174.174.31 (talk) 04:23, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

I think "Microsoft Windows systems come with the very simple Notepad, though many people—especially programmers—prefer to use a text editor with more features like the more powerful E (text editor) or NEdit." should just be changed to   "Microsoft Windows systems come with the very simple Notepad, though many people—especially programmers—prefer to use a text editor with more features." Then it'll sound more like an article instead of an ad. 71.187.223.150 00:56, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

LAPIS? --anon

Contesting list of HTML editors
The "Special features" section includes a bullet point, "World Wide Web programmers...", that includes a list of HTML editors. I'd like to point out the obvious, that this article is about text editors, and the section is discussing text editors with special features geared toward Web development. Dreamweaver, NVU, GoLive, and Frontpage, though they may have code-editing capability, are primarily graphically-driven WYSIWYG interfaces. No one in their right mind would consider these "text editors". Including these in the list is misleading and irrelevant. They should be removed. There are certainly many other text-based HTML coding editors to pad out the list, there is no need to expand the definition until its meaning is lost. 12.233.146.130 (talk) 17:30, 8 June 2009 (UTC)


 * I agree with this; If the editor is special purpose and cannot serve the general purpose of a text editor as well it should not be listed, and discussing HTML editors here is out of context at best. -- Heptite (T)   (C)   (@)  18:58, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Unnecessary and inaccurate jargon
The last set of edits did reduce word count, but some of it is not an improvement. For instance "snippets" means small fragments. Syntax highlighting generally colors "most" of a file - not just small fragments. Suggest rewording the edit using conventional English rather than idioms which do not relate to the topic. Tedickey (talk) 08:49, 1 October 2009 (UTC)


 * I made a stab at it, but I'm not the best of copy-editors. -- Heptite (T)   (C)   (@)  11:12, 1 October 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm not the fastest copyeditor, either. But proofreading - reasonably.  "Contextually" seems the weakest part of that edit. Tedickey (talk) 20:34, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Recent problems (June 2010)
This page appears to have been vandalized, presumably by SG Analytics. Replaced with text from Wiktionary. --SG —Preceding unsigned comment added by Schreibergasse (talk • contribs) 13:06, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I restored a previous version. You can look at a page's history from one of the tabs at the top. Gobonobo  T C 13:41, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

Original research
Another editor expressed the opinion that adding links to point to yet another editor's original research is unrelated to that original research. TEDickey (talk) 10:26, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, I did. Since Wikipedia contains a Distraction-free_editor article, linking to it is fair game. If you want to dispute the content as original research, do it in that article; a wikilink is a navigational device, it only says "there exists a Wikipedia article called 'Distraction-free_editor'", an assertion which is not original research on itself. Diego Moya (talk) 14:41, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

ed is the standard text editor)
Recent edit removed the fact that vi is a standard editor, and added spurious w-link for Emacs. Neither part of the change was necessary TEDickey (talk) 20:39, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

27-Feb-13 edits
User:LMSchmitt has made an edit today that I reverted. To the explanation of the difference between a text editor and a word processor, he has digressed into markup languages, giving LaTeX as an example. His change history calls it "a bit misleading," and his addition points out that the text operated on by a text editor could "be structured into columns and tables." Okay; similarly, the text being edited isn't executable, but you might be writing a program that eventually would be. In short, I think the discussion of why the user was editing text is outside the scope of the article. Separately, LMSchmitt differentiates the word processor as a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) environment. But so is the full-screen text editor, which likewise portrays the complete text file on the screen, space permitting. (What you see is not what you get only if you pass the output through markup processors and so on). WYSIWYG differentiated these text editors from their predecessors in which what you saw was nothing (except your editing commands) unless you should type a command to print out a few lines. Spike-from-NH (talk) 03:47, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

Programming editors
For programming, text editors with support for syntax highlighting, brace matching, and other features are preferred. We could name other such features, and especially outsource the darn HTML editors. User:ScotXW t@lk 14:04, 10 July 2014 (UTC)


 * @User:ScotXW: I agree. Should these details go into the source-code editor article ? --DavidCary (talk) 07:31, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

What about tabbed window ?
I searched the article for "tab" and for "multi" (looking for something like "multiple files") and made no hits. --Jerome Potts (talk) 18:11, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

Aha, just found Multiple document interface. There pbbly should be a pointer to it. --Jerome Potts (talk) 18:13, 2 December 2014 (UTC)


 * A tabbed document interface is not the same as a Multiple document interface. There are no child windows for individual documents, but a single child window whose contents depends on which tab is selected. The description in E Text Editor is too terse to guess which, if either, it uses. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 20:57, 2 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Okay, so i searched for "interface" and made only one hit with "a minimalistic interface". Like i originally said: no "tabbed", nor "multiple". --Jerome Potts (talk) 00:15, 20 December 2014 (UTC)


 * I agree that this article should at least link to multiple document interface, so I added it. I agree that a tabbed document interface is not the same thing, although many text editors support it.
 * But what about tabbed windows? What were you looking for when you searched this article for "tabbed" and made no hits? How can we make this article better? --DavidCary (talk) 17:30, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

Regular expressions an advanced feature?
"Advanced editors can use regular expressions to search and edit text or code." Even one of the most basic text editors, ed, has this ability. Is this really a something that signifies an "advanced editor"?46.230.135.7 (talk) 23:56, 29 November 2016 (UTC)


 * There may be a WP:NPOV issue here; one man's fancy feature is another man's essential feature, and different editors have different features that look advanced to those using editors without them. A an example, when I an using the ISPF/PDF editor I miss XEDIT's line macros and SET PENDING, but when I am using XEDIT I miss the ISPF distinction between data and text shift. FWIW, there have been some very powerful editors that didn't have regular expressions. I'd be inclined to drop the word advanced. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 21:09, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

re: ConTEXT
ConTEXT is one of a thousand (or more) non-notable programs, and the material in that page has little relevance to a general topic page such as this. TEDickey (talk) 22:03, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

Citations for feature or TMI?
Text editor contains a list of features. Should it include citations for editors proving those features, or would that be TMI? What about feature listed earlier as basic features? Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 16:17, 21 January 2020 (UTC).

incorrect verbiage
A recent edit substituted the standard abbreviation for "versus" (a term used to indicate contrast with vis-à-vis (a term indicating a relationship). As such, it is neither more accurate nor appropriate TEDickey (talk) 21:31, 23 September 2022 (UTC)
 * I have changed it to "and" since it's discussing plain text and rich text. I have no issue with anyone changing it back to versus or anything else, but vis-à-vis was so very much the wrong term to be used there so I changed it to something (hopefully) more appropriate. - Aoidh (talk) 16:53, 26 September 2022 (UTC)