For programmers and web developers, text editors evolved with the ability to highlight certain types of code in different colors to ensure that everything was properly formatted - in other words, that brackets were closed, that a certain code had a corresponding “close” code, etc. Of course, this meant that the programs became more difficult to use, and I personally recall some word processing applications from the late 1980s that were incredibly complex with a long learning curve.īut for many people, text editors were and are the easiest way to just quickly type out text and get it into a computer readable format. By applying formatting codes to text, it was possible to do all of those things that you couldn’t do with a plaintext editor. When the first word processing programs came out, they started making things fancier. There was no way to center text, bold-face headlines, justify text to your margins - it was just text on a screen, printed on a dot-matrix printer. Originally, if you wanted to write a letter or book on a computer, you used a plaintext editor to type in your document and then print it out. Text editors have been around since the first days of the personal computer revolution. Today’s Friday Five looks at five popular OS X text editors, what they’re best used for, and why you may want to consider using them instead of traditional word processing applications like Pages or Word. Primarily used to generate plain text files with no styling or formatting, they can be used for a huge number of purposes from taking quick notes to editing websites or writing application code. Text editors are the unsung heroes of the Mac. Each week, the Friday Five takes a quick look at a Mac OS X or iOS app to point out five things you may have overlooked before. It’s the end of the week, but that doesn’t mean an end to learning more about your favorite Apple devices.
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