There can be something of a learning curve and time spent configuring, but their flexibility, and open-source community around them, means you can end up with a tool set more suited to your needs. Thanks to their coding heritage, if you are writing more developer-focussed documentation, or documentation with lots of code examples, these editors can offer a lot of support. Primarily designed for code editing, it’s possible to extend and customize code editors such as Visual Studio Code (VSCode), Sublime, and Atom for technical writing purposes. It’s open source, “only” 18 years old, and like any other good text editor, has an extensive plugin ecosystem. Its developers are working hard to compete with the new competitors such as Visual Studio Code by adding features such as a language server (this is the feature that allows many text editors to assist when writing code).
It’s “only” 20 years old and is a stalwart of the Mac platform. They are both cross-platform, have a well established ecosystem around them, and typically, you can run them in a terminal window, or packaged as an application for your operating system.įor macOS, the most venerable option is BBEdit. These include Vim and emacs, which are both around 30 years old, but are fundamentally different in the way they operate (and of course divide people on which is ”best”). 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.
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