Development Tools - Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML - page 382

There are additional features of text editors that are not vital but can be useful:

• Customized color and font settings

• Customizable toolbars

• Spell checker

• Templates

• Bookmarks

• Full drag-and-drop support

• Built-in FTP client or integration with an (S)FTP client

• Conversions (uppercase, lowercase, invert case, and initial caps)

• International versions (can be convenient for some developers)

• Support for double-byte character systems (DBCS) used in Far East languages such as Chinese

or Japanese (if required)

• Browser preview

1 (launching the default or selected web browser for debugging and testing)

Text Editors
In contrast to word processors such as Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org Writer, plain-text editors cannot be used
for document formatting, but they are suitable for creating web pages. However, basic text editors are not convenient
for web design, because some vital features are missing from them. For example, many of them do not handle control
characters and whitespaces correctly. The most well-known examples are Notepad under Windows and vi under Linux.
Advanced text editors such as WordPad provide text formatting and other additional features. Source code editors
are advanced text editors with additional tools specifically designed for hand-coders and programmers. The most
common feature of them is syntax highlighting for a variety of markup languages, style sheets, and programming
languages. These full-featured editors are comprehensive tools suitable for hand-coding web pages. The following are
some examples:

Linux

• BlueFish [1]

• Komodo Edit [2]

Mac OS

• BBEdit [3]

• TextWrangler [4]

1 Some developers do not use this feature and open the desired browser(s) manually.