Plain text files are composed of human-readable characters and can be viewed in any text editor or many other software applications. Binary files are encoded and require specialized software. In computing, plain text is a loose term that can be interpreted several different ways, but we’ll use it as a broad term that just excludes binary files.

Motivation

Rendering a view of a plain text file through an application is an example of a fundamental concept of computing: the input/output (I/O) process. In other words, we’ll view the same file through multiple applications and it’ll look different. There’s more than meets the eye.

Text Editors

Operating systems include basic text editors, for example, Notepad on Windows and TextEdit on Mac. More advanced text editors provide many additional useful features for working with plain text files, including color-coding syntax, viewing directory structures, and integrated version control. Some text editors worth mentioning:

• Atom
• Visual Studio Code
• Brackets
• Sublime
• Vim
• Emacs

We’ll use Atom, which is an advanced text editor with lots of add-on packages that provide convenient functionality and are developed by the community of users.

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