
But they have dedicated fans who swear to their efficiency and productivity boost. They are typically highly customizable, frequently come from a heritage of running from the command line, and can have a steep learning curve. “Traditional” text editorsīefore the modern wave of text editors were a small collection of editors that have been with us for some time. They are not always optimised for writing in markup languages, but switch them into plain text mode, forgo features such as autocomplete and previews, and you have a well-integrated, simple, and unobtrusive editor that’s always available.

They are Notepad for Windows and TextEdit for macOS.

Most operating systems have a text editor included by default. This post looks at some of the best you can try if considering a switch to docs as code. The tools for writing in these markup languages are different from the specialized technical writing tools you might have used before, and again, are often designed for coding or general writing. Docs as code typically means writing in markup languages such as markdown, asciidoc, or restructured text. Docs as code is an increasingly popular approach for tech writers that follows similar principles for writing that developers follow for writing code.
