Virtues and debilities of plain text

Posted by Wes Perdue
Nov 8, 2007 at 01:57 AM

Stephen,

I thought it _was_ an option in EditPad, my preferred text editor, but I can not find it; I must be thinking of something else. EditPad does not have smart select, paste, or drag.

I use another text editor for the occasional RTF file, PolyEdit. I feel it’s in between a text editor and a word processor, as it handles plain text files well. It has only smart select (i.e. auto-selecting the trailing space on a word double-click select); it does not have smart drag or paste. There is no option to control any select behavior in PolyEdit.

I think your observation is correct; if an editor is meant for writers, it probably has smart select. If it’s meant for coders, it does not.

I’m curious to hear if any of the higher-end (read more expensive) editors have such an option.

Regards,
Wes

Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
>“Smart” paste and drag, etc. as found in word processing applications like Word and
>WordPerfect, are convenient for writing but maybe not for programming. Do plain text
>editors forego this feature, as noxious to programmers? Then why not make it an
>option? Is there a smart pasting, smart dragging, text editor on the market, or is
>there a good reason why there shouldn’t be? Or am I exaggerating this feature’s
>significance?