To learn coding, there are two essential things you need. The first is coding training, and the second is a text editor. A text editor is a program that runs on your PC or Mac, which you’ll use to write all of your code. Think of it as like a word processor, but for plain text (no formatting).

Download Notepad - Text Editor for PC free at BrowserCam. Find out how to download and then Install Notepad - Text Editor on PC (Windows) which happens to be built by Guru Info Media. Having amazing features. Notepad Notepadis a popular free to use code editor written in C. It uses pure win32 API.

Here is the screenshot of a text editor called Sublime Text:

You can also customize the color schemes.

All computers come with text editors built in. If you’re on a PC, then your built-in text editor is Notepad. If you’re on a Mac, there’s no program exclusively designed for writing code. However, you can set up TextEdit to work as a text editor by going into Preferences and selecting the Plain Text radio button.

Most coders don’t use Notepad and TextEdit though – they prefer to download a more powerful, feature-packed text editor. Here are some popular choices.

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is a popular text editor. It’s available for PC, Mac and Linux, has many useful features and is easy on the eye too. Sublime Text is also the text editor used by Treehouse, a training website highly recommended by Code Conquest.

A useful feature of Sublime Text is it has an expandable list of folders and files in a sidebar. This makes it very easy to locate and open up files.

Other Text Editors

There are hundreds of different text editors. Some are well-known, and some are very obscure. In addition to Notepad, TextEdit and Sublime Text, here are some other popular options.

Notepad++
A free and open source code editor for Windows, designed to be a replacement for the limited Notepad.

Adobe Dreamweaver
This text editor is for the purpose of designing and building websites, using HTML and CSS. It’s powerful and well-liked, but it’s costly too.

TextMate
A popular text editor for Mac OS X. Similar to Sublime Text.

Vim
This is a popular text editor among many seasoned coders, but perhaps not the right one for a total beginner.

Why You Need a Text Editor

If you’re working on a coding project, you’ll want to save your code files to your computer. Online editors like Codecademy, Scratchpad.io, jsFiddle and JSBin don’t let you do this.

If you were thinking of using a word processor like Microsoft Word, Pages, Google Docs or Open Office to write your code, don’t. When writing code, you want it to be ‘clean’ and free of any formatting. This just isn’t possible with word processors.

It may seem obvious to you, but some people do try to use programs like these to write their code. Don’t fall into this trap!

What a Text Editor Can Do

Bare-bones text editors like Notepad don’t have much functionality at all – they let you write text and that’s it. It’s almost like writing with pen and paper.

It’s totally fine to use a text editor like Notepad. But if you choose a more powerful text editor, you’ll get extra features that make coding easier for you. Here are just some of the things text editors can do:

• find text and replace it with other text
• highlight syntax (display different types of code in different colors)
• indent lines automatically
• tell you when there’s an error with your code
• open multiple files in tabs
• create and delete files inside folders
• type in multiple places at once (yes, really)

A word of warning to finish up. Some text editors are packed with features to the point where their interfaces can be quite intimidating. You don’t have to use these features, but they’re nice if you do know how to use them.

Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers.

This page explains how to ensure that a plain text (.txt) file is saved in an appropriate Unicode formatting. Saving a plain text document file as Unicode will allow you to use the text across multiple platforms and systems with minimal formatting changes. This is especially important if the text will be placed on the Web, either within the document or included in a Web page.

Page Content

Switch Keyboards or Use Codes

1. Open a blank file.
2. Switch your keyboards to the appropriate script or input appropriate symbol codes.
3. Input text as needed.

Notepad

Osx Text Editor

Notepad, the free text editor on Windows, saves in ANSI Latin encoding by default. To ensure that you are saving a Unicode .txt file, do the following:

1. Go to the File then Save or Save As… menu.
2. In the Encoding menu, change the value from ANSI to UTF-8 or other appropriate Unicode value.

Text Edit

Text Edit, the free text editor on the Mac, saves in Unicode by default, but to ensure that you are saving a Unicode .txt file, do the following:

Simple Text Editor For Mac

1. Text Edit saves as RTF (Rich Text) by default and includes formatting and font options. To convert your file to true plain text (.txt), go to the Format menu and select Make Plain Text. The formatting options will disappear and the text will likely change appearance.
2. When saving a file (File : Save), make sure the Plain Text Encoding menu is set to Unicode (UTF-8) or whatever encoding you want.
   Note: If you don’t see this menu, your file is probably set to be Rich Text (RTF).