The Language Server Protocol, first used in Microsoft's Visual Studio Code, allows for source code editors to implement an LSP client that can read syntax information about any language with a LSP server. Such tokenizing editors later uncompress the source code when viewing it, possibly prettyprinting it with consistent capitalization and spacing. A few source-code editors compress source code, typically converting common keywords into single-byte tokens, removing unnecessary whitespace, and converting numbers to a binary form. For this reason, strict structure editors are not popular for source code editing, though some IDEs provide similar functionality.Ī source-code editor can check syntax while code is being entered and immediately warn of syntax problems.

Structure editors also require extensive support for each language, and thus are harder to extend to new languages than text editors, where basic support only requires supporting syntax highlighting or indentation. In this case features such as syntax highlighting, validation, and code formatting are easily and efficiently implemented from the concrete syntax tree or abstract syntax tree, but editing is often more rigid than free-form text.

Structure editors are a different form of source-code editor, where instead of editing raw text, one manipulates the code's structure, generally the abstract syntax tree. So, while many text editors like Notepad can be used to edit source code, if they don't enhance, automate or ease the editing of code, they are not source-code editors. These editors also provide a convenient way to run a compiler, interpreter, debugger, or other program relevant for the software-development process. Source-code editors have characteristics specifically designed to simplify and speed up typing of source code, such as syntax highlighting, indentation, autocomplete and brace matching functionality. Source-code editors are a fundamental programming tool, as the fundamental job of programmers is to write and edit source code. It may be a standalone application or it may be built into an integrated development environment (IDE) or web browser. Screenshot of using Notepad++ to edit XML codeĪ source-code editor is a text editor program designed specifically for editing source code of computer programs.

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