reading-notes
My Views on Text Editors
What is a Text Editor?
A text editor is a simple piece of software that you can access that allows you to write and manage text. You can use it for a variety of things and have probably used one today. Things from Word to Google Sheets and Notepad are all text editors. You can also write code in a text editor. Would you really want to do that though? Someone might be interested in the no frills version of a text editor. Let’s be real though, we are living in an incredibly advanced time and things like text editors for coding have evolved.
You can always use things like the Terminal on your computer to access a variety of different and in depth tools to manage and operate your computer with extreme customization. The ability to dig into your computer and learn how it works is easily accomplished with the Terminal I have put together a Cheat Sheet to help you in your journey to understand your computer better and learn how to use the terminal.
There are a lot of third party options that create beautiful text editors that have a lot of advanced features to make Coding easy. Choosing a text editor is like choosing a car to drive. They all get you from A to B but some people want to have their car drive them offroad and some people want their car to be more gas efficient. Some people like to drive Ferrari’s and honestly they all get you where you are going.
Some of the top 3rd party Text Editors are
Atom
BB Edit
Brackets
Notepad++
Sublime
Text Wrangler
And my personal favorite VS Code
Each of these individual ones has a different style to them and I personally love VS Code. It’s extremely customizable and allows for so many wonderful features.
- Code Completion- This features to be able to save you time with writing code. It will fill out closing brackets for you or anticipate what you are trying to do and give you suggestions.
- Syntax Highlighting- This feature shows you when something looks amiss with your code. It will offer suggestions on how to fix it and make it better, because most of coding is about learning how to find the solution, not memorizing it.
- Theme customization- This feature allows you to make your text editor yours, you can choose a different theme from light or dark mode to even get into the choice of different highlight colors and color pallete you want to use.
- Extensions- The number of extensions will help make working of many different projects a breeze with highly specialized extensions for different coding languages and features.
Having a good text editor will be crucial to coding easily and effectively, which one is right for you is a choice you have to make.