To see the changes, the file needed to be printed on the printer. Later, the context strings were extended to regular expressions. An "edit cursor", an imaginary insertion point, could be moved by special commands that operated with line numbers of specific text strings (context). Among them were a command to print a selected section(s) of the file on the typewriter (or printer) in case of necessity. They usually had very short commands (to minimize typing) that reproduced the current line. The first text editors were line editors oriented on typewriter style terminals and they did not provide a window or screen-oriented display. The text was carried as a physical box of these thin cardboard cards, and read into a card-reader. Otherwise the file will contain those "special characters" unique to the word processor's file format and will not be handled correctly by the utility the files were intended for.īefore text editors existed, computer text was punched into Hollerith cards with keypunch machines. This is especially important in cases such as source code, HTML, and configuration and control files. However one must take care to tell the program that this is what is wanted. *Word processors can usually edit a plain text file and save in the plain text file format. These and other common page formatting symbols were once associated only with desktop publishing but are now commonplace in the simplest word processor. These enable functions like bold, italic, fonts, columns, tables, etc. *Documents created by a word processor generally contain fileformat-specific " control characters" beyond what is defined in the character set. The most commonly used character set is ASCII, especially recently, as plain text files are more used for programming and configuration and less frequently used for documentation than in the past. The only characters usable for 'mark-up' are the control characters of the used character set in practice this is newline, tab and formfeed. *A plain text file is represented and edited by showing all the characters as they are present in the file.
There are important differences between plain text files created by a text editor, and document files created by word processors such as Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, or. Text editors are often provided with operating systems or software development packages, and can be used to change configuration files and programming language source code.
A text editor is a type of program used for editing plain text files.
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