Text editors

Recommended text editors

  • Cross platform
    • Visual Studio Code is much more than a text editor, but it can also be made into a good text editor for plain text and Markdown. It is free and open source and worthy of a download to check out.
    • VSCodium is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Visual Studio Code.
    • Zed is a cross-platform, open source alternative to Visual Studio Code.
    • Obsidian is a Markdown focused alternative that is highly extensible but more focused on taking notes.
  • macOS
    • BBEdit is over 30 years old and still going strong. It is available for purchase, but you can go quite far with the free version. I recommend downloading the free version and trying it out if you are on a Mac.

Benefits and drawbacks

Benefits

See also Working with plain text.

  • Text editors are very powerful tools for working with lots of text across many files and folders.
  • Text editors are also interoperable. You do not have to pick just one. You can use one text editor for a certain task and another text editor for a different one. They are all based on your plain text files that are in your file system on your computer.
  • They can work with all different kinds of plain text documents, not only files that you might think of as presenting content (Markdown, HTML, csv, txt, etc.) but also scripts for programming languages (R, Python, Bash, etc.).
  • There are multiple free and open source options for text editors.
  • Text editors like Visual Studio Code and Zed are full integrated development environments (IDEs) that have all sorts of tools for writing code, including documentation, code completion, and their own command line interface.

Drawbacks

  • This last point gets to one of the main drawbacks of text editors. They can be overly complex and confusing; they can be too much when you just want to quickly jot something down.
  • This is also true for Obsidian, which has an almost endless amount of options for how you can use it.
  • You also need to invest at least some time in learning how to use your chosen editor if you want to get many of the benefits of its power.
  • It is up to you how deep you want to go on this. The goal is to write better research not to create the perfect system.

Setup

Visual Studio Code and VSCodium

Visual Studio Code and VSCodium are essentially the same software, but VSCodium does not have access to Microsoft’s Extension Marketplace. These instructions are based on Visual Studio Code.

  1. Download Visual Studio Code for your system.
    • Refer to the Visual Studio Code documentation if you have questions, but try not to get caught up in the complexity of what is possible.
  2. Set up Visual Studio Code to work with Markdown files.
  3. You might want to pick a color theme.
    • You also might want to pick your font and size.
  4. Tweak your profile and settings.
    • I like to turn the markdownlint extension off. I do not feel that I need error messages if I make a mistake in Markdown.

Zed

Zed is probably a bit easier to get up and going.

  1. Download Zed for your system.
  2. Look through the documentation on getting started. As with Visual Studio Code, skip over anything that does not apply to you.
  3. Zed is set up to work with Markdown by default.

BBEdit

BBEdit is the easiest to get up and going and should be relatively familiar looking if you are used to macOS.

  1. Download BBEdit using the Free Download link.
  2. Look over the documentation.

Obsidian

Obsidian is designed for Markdown note taking and has many of the powerful feature of other text editors.

  1. Download Obsidian for your system.
  2. Go through the Get started documentation

Usage

The power of text editors is their ability to work on one file at a time or across multiple files and folders. You can open a single file, but most of the power of text editors is unleashed by opening a folder of files and working on multiple files at once.

Text editors also work best by taking advantage of keyboard shortcuts. Each editor will have different features and shortcuts. However, Zed can be set up to use the same shortcuts as Visual Studio Code by default. You can also learn keyboard shortcuts one at a time by using the command palette, a dialogue that allows you to search for commands. The command palette shortcut is:

  • Visual Studio Code, VSCodium, and Zed: Cmd + Shift + P or Ctrl + Shift + P
  • BBEdit: Cmd + Shift + U
  • Obsidian: Cmd + P or Ctrl + P.

All of these text editors have a shortcut or button to live preview Markdown documents, to see the headings (#) turned into larger headings, links[]() hyperlinked text, and bold (**) and italic (*) into bold and italic text.

  • Visual Studio Code, VSCodium, and Zed: Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + V
    • Pressing Cmd/Ctrl + K and then V will open the preview to the right.
  • BBEdit: Control + Cmd + P
  • Obsidian: Cmd/Ctrl + E to toggle between editing and preview modes.

This is the merest tip of the iceberg of the powers of these text editors. They can do all sorts of things for you, including searching across thousands of files, linking files to each other, and enabling the use of multiple cursors to make changes in many places at once. One way to see what you can do is to search through the keyboard shortcuts available in a text editor.

  • Visual Studio Code, VSCodium, and Zed: Cmd/Ctrl K + Cmd/Ctrl S
  • BBEdit: Look through the command palette with Cmd + Shift + U
  • Obsidian: Look through the command palette with Cmd/Ctrl + P

Resources on how historians are using Obsidian

There are a number of resources available on how to use these tools for research. Use these to give ideas about what you can do. There is no one right answer on how to build your research workflow.