Recommended Text Editors for Scripting & Text File Handling

Much of the data science is text based, including plain text files, csv, JSON files, Markdown files, even jupyter notebook files, python/R scripts, and shell scripts. Having a powerful text editor can increase your productivity and empower you.

Here are a few text editors that I have used and recommend. All of them are powerful editors with tons of features and abilities that can edit all kinds of text files as mentioned above. They all support syntax highlighting, multi-cursor editing, useful shortcuts, powerful search/replace features, etc. All of them are free also.

• Visual Studio Code: Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a newer and immensely popular text editor. It is cross-platform, modern, and inherits the best features of outstanding text/script editors such as sublime, and make them even more professionally done, extensible, and powerful. I switched from Sublime to VS Code recently for VS Code's built-in support for jupyter notebook. It has nearly all of the sublime features that I regularly use and more. Love it so far.

• Notepad++: beloved text/script editor for Windows users. It had been my primary editor for a long time before I switched to Sublime Text about 3 years ago.

• Sublime Text: text/script editor for all platforms (the evaluation version does not expire but it will ask you to purchase once in a while). It is beautiful, supports powerful multi-cursor editing, select all text of the same pattern, searching in all files, tons of plugins (and easy-to-install), easy to use command pallete, go to anything, and git integration. I have happily used for a while for all of my coding, git repositories, note taking, to-do list management, and the entire course production workflow.