Text editors’ primary function is writing and editing plain text files of code. A text editor may also offer some WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) features, showing the expression of your code in either another window or another tab. In this day and age of cloud-based software, a text editor might even be accessible in a browser, making it easy to write HTML code and see the results. Text editor software makes it easy for developers to write code in a lightweight environment. To qualify for inclusion in the Text Editor category, a product must: Text editors often integrate with source code management software and build automation software tools through plugins. Beginning developers can turn leverage free text editor tools to meet their needs.

Developers who do not work in a system where a full-fledged IDE is needed, or where an IDE is too restricting, will often find that a text editor gives them more flexibility and freedom to code outside of standardized methods of development. Text editors are ideally fast and lightweight for editing and manipulating a small number of text files at a time, and they provide features like regular expression search and replace, syntax highlighting, autocompletion, and multiple tabs or window panes.

Text editors are scaled-down from the full functionality of an integrated development environment ( IDE), but may have plugins that blur the lines between the two. Text editor software is used by programmers and developers for manipulating plain text source code, editing configuration files or documentation, or viewing error logs.

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