Opening a Text Editor

In order to open and edit a text file, you need to open a text editor. There are hundreds of such editors and many people have a favorite one for different reasons.

There are three standard editors that work within a command line interface:

• nano, simple and user-friendly for quick edits
• vim, powerful but very un-friendly to beginners
• emacs, powerful but also un-friendly to beginners

If you are writing a large program, graphical editors provide advanced features in a beginner friendly form. Some popular, free graphical editors that run on all major platforms include:

• atom, open-source editor developed by github
• brackets, open-source editor developed by adobe
• gedit, simple, open-source editor default to most Linux distributions
• visual studio code, free light-weight editor developed by Microsoft