For those interested in learning more about or working with text encoding, TEI, or various computational approaches to humanistic scholarship, it would be really helpful if you already had a plain text editor on your preferred computing device (PCD). Since PCDs come in a three principle flavors — Windows, Mac, and Linux — it might be useful to list a few links to various offerings:
- For Windows users, a lot of people love love love NotePad++, which in addition to having a lot of plug-ins and other extensions, also has a very active user community that can fix or build just about anything.
- For Mac users, Textmate remains a popular choice, as does Sublime Edit, both are free to download. TM is now open sourced, and Sublime has a very liberal trial period. There is also always BBEdit, which is available through the App Store. (For those wanting the pure command line experience, Vim and Emacs are built into Mac OS X.)
- I won’t even dare attempt GUI plain text editors for Linux. Use Vim or Emacs and mutter at each other as you like.
Whatever your choice in plain text editor, if it doesn’t contain with syntax highlighting for XML, then look to see about adding that functionality if you can.
