Newbie question

[Pat McCann]

ttdckd at aol.com (TTDCKD) writes:

> This may sound stupid but im realy new to programming and i dont know what a
> text editor is. I need to know what a text editor is so i can creat module
> files in the future.

Others have explained that it allows you to edit text.

They are often just called "editors" or "program(ming) editors".

There are a few characteristics that they usually don't share with a
word processor (not exactly true, but think of it this way for now):

-- The files hold plain ASCII text very much like what you see when you're
editing.  No hidden codes to mark paragraphs, bold, etc.

-- There is only one character font and it is of fixed size.

-- The editor often has functions specifically to ease programming.

Eventually you should learn Emacs (or XEmacs) and "vi" and maybe
someone's idea of a good GUI editor and decide which you prefer.  They
make progamming (and much other stuff which you wouldn't believe) much
easier and faster than a simple thing like Notepad.  Some people do most
of their work with nothing but their editors as they have command line
interface windows as well as text editing windows.  They may seem hard
to learn at first, but you'll quickly have your fingers trained to do
things without thinking (and without strangling your mouse, though you
can do that too if you want).