A tribute to text editors at 10,000 Words

10,000 words has a useful piece on text editors. Ethan Klapper looks at tools to deal with HTML, PHP and CSS files — three types of web code modern journalists should at least be familiar with, if not fluent in.

I use the mentioned Notepad ++ to work on this site. The application is useful because it understands HTML, PHP and CSS code using colour and collapsible sections to make the job easier.

Plain text is underrated as a writing tool. I’ve just returned from covering a conference. When I arrived at the venue, the version of Microsoft Office installed on my laptop had timed out and there wasn’t an opportunity to fix matters.

This meant I had to file my stories using plain text. It worked perfectly and I barely skipped a beat. The experience reminded me of what I’ve already written about, Word is a huge complex application, journalists barely use 10 percent of its functionality.