Greg Chapman
Text

A Text Editor for CromeOS

Text

While Windows has Notepad, the default text editor on a device running ChromeOS is called "Text". On first encountering it you might feel it is no better than its Windows equivalent, but it does have a couple of undocumented features that show up if you are editing a file with an ".html" extension to its name.

In short, regard this article as less a program recommendation and more notes on features that may not be immediately obvious and don't just open Text and start typing. Instead, have an appropriately named file ready. Open that, delete any unwanted content, then start typing.

The first thing you'll notice in the image below is that the tags, their arguments and values are all colour coded. Something you may not notice until you run 28 second video clip is that the editor features "tag matching". When the cursor is placed following the first character that identifies the tag, you'll see an underline character appear and they'll be a matching underline in the partner, opening or closing, tag. The matching facility also works for the pointy brackets that form the tags. Should you save a page and find it utterly corrupted it is likely to be caused by the lack of one of those symbols somewhere in the code. This facility can be extremely helpful for locating the missing symbol.

Not illustrated in the video but you will also find, as soon as you complete any opening tag, that the appropriate closing tag will appear after the cursor. Another feature not shown in the video is that should you have turned on "Smart Indent" under "Settings" and you type a carriage return, you'll get a tab as well. This can be helpful if you like you code formatted as you find on this site.

If after trying Text you decide it's not for you, then you might want to try an editor from the Google Play store. They're designed for phones and tablets but some work acceptably on a ChromesOS device.