The best text editor in the world
Over the years I've used many text editors, including but not limited to Vim, Nano, gedit, Scintella, Notepad++, Sublime, Coda, Text wrangler, Aptana, Eclipse and probably a few more that I can't recall without a little searching. Point being I have used a lot. The most important thing I found about choosing a text editor is that it be able to save plain unformatted text to a file.
For all intents and purposes I have chosen Sublime because it will run on my Linux system and my Windows laptop. Notepad++ will always be my backup. Now all of the editors above have that same feature in common. So one may ask.. Why do so many editor exist? Well hopefully by the end of this post you may understand why.
To put it simply, I think the reason is because everyone has differing preferences, views, and opinions. Because of that we now have some really awesome time-saving features and shortcuts to be thankful for.
Basic features of a text editor
Like I said before the most important thing about a text editor is that it save unformatted text to a file. Not all text editors are created equal. For example Microsoft Word will have a difficult time trying to create code because it adds markup for fonts, colors and styles. Text editors just don't do that, they will only save what you type and no more. Some other basic features of text editors include.
Newline conversion - The different newline conventions often cause text files that have been transferred between systems of different types to be displayed incorrectly. This solves that problem.
Undo and redo - Just like graphic programs there are undo and redo functions that will go back and undo your last edit. You can even go back further if you wanted.
Syntax highlighting - This will highlight parts of the code with different colors so that it makes reading easier. For instance it might color HTML tags one way and attributes another.
Text formatting - Most editors have features like Auto indenting, and tabbing, or list formatting making it easy to type a list of items.
Here is a really large comparison of a lot of text editors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_text_editors
So what makes the best text editor in the world?
I think it should be based on beginner friendliness, speed, and price. But most importantly it's the one that you can use to produce code. Text editors are like hammers, there are lots of different ones. But they all serve the same purpose. So pick one up and get to work.
