Text editors provide a lightweight alternative to word processors, allowing users to work with plain, unformatted text. This content covers two widely used options — Notepad and Notepad++ — and the practical scenarios where each fits best.
Text Editors Overview
Something very similar to word processors are text editors. That is, we can edit text, but it doesn't have all the fancy features that a word processor has. For instance, a word processor is great if we want to create maybe some sort of flyer where we want to organize our words in such a way that it presents really well, versus a text editor is just a way that we can go in and edit simple text.
What I'm going to do is click on the start menu here and type in to bring up Notepad. Now I love Notepad, I use it a lot, and I love the fact that they've added fairly recently these different tabs, so it's really great.
I use it a lot of times when I just want to make a quick note, so I could just type in here Note One, Note Two, and maybe I just want to create a quick outline or do something. That's one way that I use this. It's great because I don't actually have to save it. I can close out of the app and then bring it back up, and if we bring it back up here, you'll notice that I may save it if I want, but it just automatically brings it up the next time I open it. So I really love Notepad for quick notes.
The other thing that I use this for as well is that this saves things in txt format, which doesn't have any special formatting to it. It just really only has one font to it, and we can't change different fonts and different sizes and that type of stuff. So it allows me to really make sure that I'm not copying over different characters or different things that are unseen.
Let me give you an example of what I mean by that. What I'm going to do is pull up my website. I'm going to copy some text here, and I'm going to paste it into here, and we notice that it pastes with a lot of formatting. Now there is a paste function so that I don't have to paste it with a lot of formatting, but I'm just going to show you to prove a point here. What I can do is I can actually paste it into here, and we can see it doesn't have the formatting involved in it. Now what I can do is I can copy this and bring it over to another area and paste it into here.
One thing I do know, as I mentioned, there is another paste feature, so I could within this program do an edit, paste without formatting, and get a similar result right there. But my whole point here is that it's a great way to create text that doesn't have any kind of formatting to it, or use it as a staging point if you don't want to copy formatting over into another document.
Notepad is very basic, and there are times when I want a few more features that Notepad just doesn't offer, but I also don't want all the formatting of a typical Word document or word processor. So what I can do is download Notepad++.
I've already downloaded it, so let's open this up. We're going to open up a document into it, and you can see there's not a lot of formatting and stuff involved on this, but it also parses out my code so that way I can easily edit it. So I can collapse these different sections.
One of the reasons why I really like this program is because it really helps with editing different code and different software. If I was like a full-on programmer I probably wouldn't use this for editing software, but I like just the simplicity of this, and there are times when I dabble in programming that this is a great way for me to be able to edit some documents like that. Plus there are a lot of other great features in here that I can really leverage to edit a document.
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