How to edit a Plain Text File

If you're still fuzzy on the difference between text editors and word processors: A word processor allows you to format text. If you can do things like underline or boldface part of your text or mix different fonts in one document, then you're looking at a word processor.

Test for a correctly formatted plain text file:

• DOS Text Editors

  MS-DOS from version 4.0 up includes a simple text editor free with the operating system. It's called EDIT. You can just type edit filename.are and you'll be on your way. EDIT is limited to files of about 60 Kilobytes size. This is enough for small to medium areas but will fail on large ones.

  Many other good text editors are available for DOS, either as freeware or shareware. Semware's QEDIT served me well for many years. Like most good DOS editors, it does not restrict file size to 60 KB. Where there is a restriction, it is usually in the hundreds of KB.

  In a pinch, MS-Word or Word Perfect can be used to create an area file. However, you must be very sure to save the file as 'plain DOS text' or 'plain text with line feeds' or something like that. See Test for a correctly formatted plain text file, above, for how to tell if you've produced a legible plain-text file.

• Windows, Win95 and Windows NT Text Editors

  MS-Windows and its various derivatives all include a simple editor called NOTEPAD. Like its DOS counterpart (EDIT), NOTEPAD is limited to files of about 60 KB size. This is enough for small to medium areas but will fail on large ones.

  Win95 and NT feature a new, improved text editor with word processing capabilities called WORD PAD. Depending on the kind of file it is used on, Word Pad can imitate a straight text editor like Note Pad or it can do a subset of the funky things MS WORD does. BEWARE: You MUST save your area file as a 'text document in DOS format'! If you save as a Word 6 document, your area file will be totally unintelligible to any MUD system. The simplest way to get Word Pad to work the right way is to give your file a '.TXT' extension rather than '.ARE'. Word Pad treats .TXT files as simple plain-text files by default and also finds them more easily in a directory than .ARE files. Calling the file by the 'wrong' extension is no big problem to anyone: Either you can rename the file before you send it to the implementor, or the imp does it for you.

  There are many excellent freeware and shareware editors available on the Internet. I used to use a freeware tool called Super Note Tab but was annoyed by some minor bugs so I switched to Ultra Edit, which is shareware priced at $35. Note that these are only 2 examples among hundreds, as almost anyone who learns to program sooner or later undertakes to build a better mousetrap (editor).

  Although there is no sensible reason to do so, Word Perfect and MS Word can be used to edit area files. However, you must be very sure to save the file as 'plain DOS text' or 'plain text with line feeds' or something like that. See Test for a correctly formatted plain text file, above, for how to tell if you've produced a legible plain-text file.

• UNIX, Linux and other IX'es

  Unix users have their choice of pico, vi, emacs and many other excellent text editors. These programs don't restrict your choice of names in any way and never produce the kind of binary garbage that often comes out of word processors. Most text processing programs for UNIX (and its derivatives, like Linus) are freeware. There's really no excuse to be using a text processor.