From the course: CSS Positioning Best Practices

Choosing a text editor - CSS Tutorial

From the course: CSS Positioning Best Practices

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Choosing a text editor

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As you are working with HTML, and XHTML, and CSS, and other computer code kinds of things, you are going to want to be using a text editor and not a word processor. So here's the difference. A word processor formats text. It has italics, and it has bold, it has columns, and it has graphics, and all kinds of stuff. As you type in your text, it's not just saving the text. It's also saving all of this formatting information, what we in the biz call meta information, along with the text. So when you are editing code, like HTML, or XHTML, or CSS, or a language like Perl, or PHP, or C, or anything that's supposed to be just plain text, then you need a text editor that is not a word processor. If you use a word processor to do the exercises in this course, it will not work. You need to be using a text editor. Here are your choices. If you are on a Mac, and I use a Mac at home, and so I happened to use BBEdit. BBEdit is a fantastic text editor. It is not free, but it has many, many cool and useful features, and I personally love it. Like I said, it's not free. The same people that make BBEdit make TextWrangler and TextWrangler is free and it has almost all the features of BBEdit. It's actually a great text editor and if you don't want to spend the money on BBEdit, go ahead and get TextWrangler and you will find that it works great for you. If you are on a PC, and I work on a PC often, and when I do I use Notepad++. I used to use another text editor that I had paid for, that was not free, that was a great text editor, and over the years Notepad++ has eclipsed this other pay-for text editor and Notepad++ is free. It has many, many fantastic and useful features and the text editor that I'm using in this course, on this video,is Notepad++. So there you have it. You must use a text editor, a plain text editor; you cannot use a word processor for this purpose and here are a couple of good choices. For the Mac, you have BBEdit and you have TextWrangler, which is free, and is almost all of BBEdit, and you have Notepad++ for the PC environment.

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