Installing a Text Editor

Articles on SpongeDocs are saved as text files in the reStructuredText markup language. Although your operating system’s default text editor is likely sufficient for editing these files, installing a different text editor may prove to be useful.

Downloads

Visual Studio Code

VS Code is a cross platform, open source, code and text editor by Microsoft licensed under the MIT license. It is a popular choice used by many of Sponge’s developers, for writing documentation and even for developing plugins. Unlike a regular text editor there is support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, code refactoring, and more. There is also Git support, a great plugin for reST support, and even a plugin for HOCON.

VS Code can be downloaded for free from https://code.visualstudio.com/.

Atom

Atom is an open-source text editor published under the MIT license. Atom has built-in support for projects stored in a Git repository, such as SpongeDocs. This article goes more in depth about the features of Atom’s Git integration. If you’re interested in adding reST support to Atom, check out this package.

Atom can be downloaded for free from https://atom.io/.

Notepad++

Notepad++ is, arguably, one of the most popular text editors.

Notepad++ can be downloaded for free from https://notepad-plus-plus.org/.

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is a multi-platform text editor, with quite a few useful features. It includes the ability to customize the look of the editor, create useful macros, and even includes a plugin API to make your editing even easier. Sublime Text provides both a free version and a paid version.

Sublime Text can be downloaded for free from https://www.sublimetext.com/