Text Editors

caution

Proceed with caution: This page is still under construction!

What is a text editor?

Text editors are the software applications we use to read and write file contents. In most cases, this means writing programs with code, so we can run studies online or analyze data to verify results.

Editors available

There are a variety of text editors available. Some of the most popular editors that are used by software developers at every skill level include:

• Shell
  • Vim
  • Emacs
• Applications
  • Atom
  • Sublime Text
  • VisualStudio Code

Regardless of which you pick, do some research to learn about the different editors. Ultimately it is up to you to choose the editor that works best for you (i.e., one may have a color scheme and comes with keyboard shortcuts that you really like, while another may have great autocompletion packages and a nice project files search feature).

Editor configurations

Working on teams with distributed version control (Git) requires us to make sure that our text editing environments are compatible with one another.

What is a text editing environment? The settings configured for your text editor that define how your text is written, like character sets, indent spacing, etc.

To make compatible configuration easy, opt for using a shared configuration that everyone uses on the team. Use EditorConfig.