Text editors

Programmers editors, generic text editors or word processors that have flexible enough in formatting options that they can be used to write and edit code with. The editor can be a native OS/2 program, a Windows or DOS compatible program that runs under the DOS or Win-OS/2 sub-systems or a program that requires a runtime that is currently available and supported under OS/2 such as Java.

While most recent programmers editors are native OS/2 applications there was in the 90s a number of family mode editors on the market, these are DOS applications that took advantage of OS/2 features when running under OS/2, with support for long file names, large files, extended codepages and so on. Unlike most other applications, text and programmers editors were much more acceptable to most users as DOS or Win-OS/2 applications in place of native apps, presumably since there was less need for specific OS/2 features in a text editor than in for instance word processors or because people were already married to a specific text editor that did not come in an OS/2 version, also OS/2 allowed you to run DOS in the same codepage as you used for native OS/2 even though your national codepage for DOS differed, meaning that you could edit text files using the same character sets under the DOS subsystem and OS/2.

Therefore there is less emphasis placed here on OS/2 only or native apps than in most other sections of the site.

Programmers editors
Text editors especially developed to edit source code and other text or binary files used for development purposes. These invariably include some automatic formatting and syntax highlighting features as a minimum, otherwise they are considered generic text editors.

Generic text editors
See also: Word processors