A program, also known as an editor, that enables you to create and edit text files. There are many different types of editors, but they all fall into two general categories:

line editors: A primitive form of editor that requires you to specify a specific line of text before you can make changes to it.

screen-oriented editors: Also called full-screen editors, these editors enable you to modify any text that appears on the display screen by moving the cursor to the desired location.

The distinction between editors and word processors is not clear-cut, but in general, word processors provide many more formatting features. Nowadays, the term editor usually refers to source code editors that include many special features for writing and editing source code.

Noders like their text editing.

Philosophy: editor, My Text Editor, A word processor is not a text editor, line-at-a-time editor, Editing text on UNIX, Please use plain text, ASCII art

Emacs: escape meta alt control shift, XEmacs, the key commands all emacs users should know, The E2 Emacs Reference Guide, An introduction to EMACS, Making Emacs look pretty, Emacs Lisp/elisp, Lisp Interaction Mode, term-nasty.el

Hot Emacs Tips! C-x, M-x, hippie-expand, Using source control inside Emacs, an Emacs lisp example, useful emacs lisp functions, Emacs Code to Nodify The Tech's Shakespeare Texts, How to save outgoing mail with Emacs, HTML unlinker for Emacs, How to save a fontified buffer as HTML in Emacs, Using Emacs as a programmer's calculator, M-x % (which should be M-%, of course)

Silly Emacs features: Loading the ELIZA engine built into emacs, M-x doctor, M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead, M-x dissociated-press ate my homework, M-x dunnet, M-x tetris, M-x spook

vi: Learning the vi Editor, vi keys, :wq, :wq!, how to exit vi, vi macro, nvi (vi clone), ex (vi ancestor)

vim: cheat codes for vim, gvim (vim gets a GUI)

Holy Wars: emacs vi disjunction, Vi vs Emacs, The Church of Emacs, Have you let Emacs into your heart?, M-x praise-be-unto-emacs, M-x praise-be-unto-xemacs

ed: Ed is the Standard Editor

pico: pico -w

Notepad: Windows Notepad, Visual Notepad, How to add a notepad entry to the file right click menu, This Site Created With Notepad

Windows editors: EditPlus, Programmer's File Editor, editpad, TextPad, ultraedit, Notepad+, metapad, NoteTab, metapad (thanks MALTP)

Others: ex (for Unix), NEdit (for Motif), Scintilla (for GTK+) BBEdit (Mac), Hydra (OS X collaborative editor), Joe/Joe's Own Editor (*nix), Jed (multiplatform), EDLIN/EDIT (DOS), TECO (it's old)

You can go to http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/Editors/ for even more.

Please /msg anything I've missed.

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