Text Editor, Text Editor

They usually had very short commands (to minimize typing) that reproduced the current line. Among them were a command to print a selected section(s) of the file on the typewriter (or printer) in case of necessity. An "edit cursor", an imaginary insertion point, could be moved by special commands that operated with line numbers of specific text strings (context). Later, the context strings were extended to regular expressions. To see the changes, the file needed to be printed on the printer. These "line-based text editors" were considered revolutionary improvements over keypunch machines. In case typewriter-based terminals were not available, they were adapted to keypunch equipment. In this case the user needed to punch the commands into the separate deck of cards and feed them into the computer in order to edit the file.

For example, Unix and Unix-like operating systems have the vi editor (or a variant), but many also include the Emacs editor. Microsoft Windows systems come with the very simple Notepad, though many people—especially programmers—prefer to use one of many other Windows text editors with more features. Under Apple Macintosh's classic Mac OS there was the native SimpleText, which was replaced by TextEdit.

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