The main difference with these text editors compared to code editors is that they often don't come with all of the added functionality that can assist with writing code (see below). Technically you can write scripts with any sort of basic text editor such as TextEdit on Mac, Notepad on Windows or even Nano on Linux. They help you write code much faster, keep your code nicely formatted for improved readability, and can even help you identify mistakes or potential issues with your scripts before you run them! There are many different code editors available but here we will focus on two of the most popular and comprehensive editors: Atom and Visual Studio Code. Code editors are essentially just text editors that have designed specifically for writing and editing code. Code Editors Example of Visual Studio Code IntelliSense suggestions and syntax highlightingįirst and foremost, anyone who works with code and scripts needs to have a good code editor. In this blog post we describe three helpful classes of desktop applications that you can use to better manage your research workflows.

Fortunately, there are many useful applications that were designed (primarily for software developers) to assist with writing, editing, documenting and managing your scripts, and to prevent many of those face-palm moments. We've all had those 'Now what was that useful command I ran a few weeks ago?', 'What does this line of code do again?', or 'Uh oh, I accidentally deleted some code and now I have no way to recover it!' moments. Because many researchers work closely with the command line to run their analyses, managing and documenting scripts and workloads is key for reproducibility.

Evernote alternative with code block