Five Best Text Editors

Despite decades of advancement in computing power, nothing has replaced the usefulness of a good text editor—whether you're managing a to-do list or elbow deep in code. Here's a look at five of the best text editors.

Photo by Jamie Cox.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite text editor, and now we're back to share the results.

Notepad++ (Windows, Free)

Notepad++ is a popular Windows-based text editor. Unlike many text editors that have been ported to and fro, Notepad++ was built from the ground up to be a lightning fast Windows editor. Notepad++ supports tabbed editing, drag and drop text movement, a multi-item clipboard, split screen editing with synchronized scrolling, find and replace across multiple documents, and file comparison. If you're using Notepad++ for editing code, it supports syntax highlighting for over 48 programming languages, auto-completion, and includes a built-in FTP browser for accessing and updating remote code. In fact, if you're a big Notepad++ fan, it's worth your time to check out our guide to getting more plus out of Notepad++.

Reuters Tells Journos: Don’t Break News on Twitter! Rate This Quantcast

Reuters is in a bit of a bind.
To protect its bread-and-butter wire service, it’s telling its journalists not to “scoop the wire” by breaking news stories on Twitter. According to the latest guidelines issued to staff:

As with blogging within Reuters News, you should make sure that if you have hard news content that it is broken first via the wire. Don’t scoop the wire. NB this does not apply if you are ‘retweeting’ (re-publishing) someone else’s scoop.

“Scooping the wire” must have been a difficult discussion internally. Just a year ago, Dean Wright, the agency’s global editor for ethics and innovation (interesting to see that Reuters has paired ethics and innovation in the same position) wrote in a blog:

What is AppleScript?

AppleScript is a scripting language that is very much based on English. That means that AppleScript is astonishingly easy to pick up. You can use AppleScript to manipulate files in the Finder, and to interact with and control many applications that support AppleScript. You can even manipulate the same file with a series of applications via AppleScript. If you are hesitant about learning AppleScript, you can use Automator. Automator enables you to create simple tasks that are performed by dragging and dropping pre-made scripts called Actions into a particular order. A collection of Actions creates an Automator Workflow. Once you've create a Workflow, you can name it, save it, and reuse it whenever you want. You can even attach a Workflow to a folder and then process whatever you drop into that folder with the Workflow, automatically. Or you can associate an Automator Workflow with a function key, and invoke it from the keyboard. Automator, AppleScript, and AppleScript Editor are all included in OS X.

Free Online Photo Editing Tools

When Photoshop, GIMP or similar image editing programs aren’t an option, there are more than a few online alternatives that will help make simple changes to your photos and images. No wacky morphing tools here; just the features journalists need.


1. Fotoflexer
Crop; resize; rotate; flip; hue/saturation/lightness; contrast; various Photoshop-like effects.
2. Photobucket
Crop; resize; rotate; flip; hue/saturation/lightness; contrast; various Photoshop-like effects.

Improvements to Blogger In Draft's Text Editor

by Jiho Han, Software Engineer

We've made a couple of improvements to the Text Editor on Blogger in Draft! 

Add captions to your photos 

Now you can easily add captions to the images you include in your blog posts! To add a caption, simply click on the image you've inserted, and click Add caption.