TechEssence.info

Every librarian should get friendly with a text editor—and no, NotePad, WordPad (both on Windows) and TextEdit (Mac) don't count. Neither does Microsoft Word. A good text editor (sometimes called a "source editor" or "programmers' editor") is the Swiss army knife of software. It does a little bit of everything, and a lot of things surprisingly well.

Need to edit an HTML or CSS file? Read a software README file? Alter a configuration file on your computer? Read RDA listserv postings? How about search-and-replace the same niggling little error in fifty HTML files? Need to blog or wiki something, but hate typing into a box on a web page (not least because the web page can't save your work)?

A text editor will do all these things (and more!) quickly, quietly, and efficiently. Trust me, you will fall in love with a good one.

That said, if your favorite techie tries to get you to learn emacs or vi, run swiftly in the opposite direction; screaming is optional. These programs are bizarre holdovers from the early days of UNIX, and they are not for casual users. You can find a better fit.

Features to look for include:

• syntax highlighting/coloration (this will, for example, turn HTML tags pretty colors to set them apart from text)
• search-and-replace over multiple files
• a "find differences between two files" function (often called "diff")
• Unicode support (at the very least, it should be able to read and write UTF-8)
• save to an FTP server (great for quick changes to websites)
• regular-expression search and replace

That last item, sometimes called "grep," is a way to search-and-replace on patterns in text. It's a little too complicated to explain here (I used to have a tutorial up; will have to repost it sometime), and there is a learning curve involved, but a little bit of study will offer rich returns in what you can do to fix up old web pages.

The gold-standard for Windows is UltraEdit, which I used for years. Before buying it, however, try out the free Crimson Editor. For Mac, BBEdit is what folks swear by, but I'm pretty much content with the free version, TextWrangler.

Wikipedia has a longer list for the interested.

So the next time you're considering starting up Dreamweaver to make one little change to a web page, try a text editor instead. I think you'll be glad you did.