Website Programmers use a variety of tools that can help them speed up their productivity while writing code. Some programmers…
If you have a WordPress website, you can run your website for years without ever needing to write a single line of code. That’s one of the reasons WordPress is such a great Content Management System. But if you’re serious about your website and you plan to spend lots of time tweaking it until it’s perfect for your audience, you’ll get the most out of it if you invest in two things: WordPress hosting and a great text editor.
A text editor is software that lets you open, create, and edit plain text files. Text editors are different from word processors, which are designed to produce streamlined, formatted documents. Word processors are great for typing up an essay or a letter, but when you need to code, what you need is a text editor.
Software programmers, web developers, and people managing their WordPress websites use text editors to write and edit programming and markup languages. They’re great for people who need to quickly and easily write or read source code.
You’re probably already familiar with at least one text editor, even if you don’t realise it. (Most modern computers already come pre-installed with Notepad.) But more advanced text editors usually come with extra features like syntax highlighting, which colour codes text based on programming language. (This is a lifesaver when you need to write long strings of code!) They also feature tools like advanced Find and Replace, document comparison, and more!
Most casual WordPress users will never need to code at all. But the longer you manage your website, and the more time you spend enhancing it, the more likely it is that you’re going to find yourself needing to add a WordPress feature that requires code.
A problem arises, however, when we need to maintain coding information over a number of years. File formats are constantly changing, and this can make it hard to ensure that the text you write will remain readable over time. If you want to be able to read something on any device, you need to use a plain text format. Text editors can read plain text files with no problem, because they change so little over time that even decades-old plain text files can still be read by text editors today.
Text editors also use a format called ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), which makes them compatible with any operating system. This means that it doesn’t matter which device you use to store your plain text file or how long ago your plain text file was stored. It can be opened and read by virtually any computer across time.
Technically, you can use a word processor for most things that you can use a text editor for. But there are some very good reasons to choose a text editor:
Text editors are one way to take the stress out of running your WordPress website. If you want to make managing your website even easier, you’ll also want to look into WordPress hosting.
You probably already know that you can’t create a website unless you have good web hosting. WordPress hosting is a category of web hosting that was specially designed for WordPress users. With WordPress hosting, you get access to WordPress plugins and all the other features that make it possible to run your WordPress website.
To use WordPress, you need a hosting plan with MySQL and PHP support. If you choose a web hosting plan that’s not tailored to WordPress users, your website won’t perform optimally, and you might not even be able to use your website at all.
Text editors are the perfect addition to your website-management toolkit. If you’ve been chugging by with your word processor because you just didn’t know anything about text editors, now’s a great time to give one a try! You won’t be able to go back to word processors once you see how easy it is to use a text editor to create files that are always perfectly compatible with any device.