There are many differences between text editor and a word processor. One of those differences is that most text editors are universal in editing any text based documents, while word processors can only edit certain types of files like Open Office. So, because of that universal editing more text editors are very basic and so they carry few commands, such as copy and paste and being able to save the document. While word processors have hundreds of commands and come with many other features such as templates, thesaurus, spell checker etc etc.

So with all those features a word processor has, that means that their is usually price tag and so another major difference is that most text editors are free as well. However, there are some text editors that are built like word processors and HTML editors and so they come with various features and what not.

THus the reason why text editors are very important in Linux because these open source programs can practically do anything and in the linux world, being able to building open source applications is a major reason to have a text editor around and on top of that you can quickly customize your linux distro as well since most linux distros configuration files can be edited by a text editor.

The editor tht I will be talking about is called EMACS (Editable Macro's) and the reason I chose this editor is because it has a long history and is favorable editor by some LISP hackers as well. This editor first came out in 1976 and is still on that market as of 2008. This text editor is very customizable and comes in many different versions and so the features are limitless. If you do a search for EMACS in your synaptics package manager you should be able to find various versions of this software. Although I have not used this editor myself I found it a interesting software because of its connection to LISP Hacking.

So the questions I put on table about this topic are what are some other differences between a text editor and a word processor and of course what are your favorites?

SOURCES

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

http://www.linux.com/feature/137879

Personally, I prefer text editors because they run more file types and are more portable.

Me too...whenever I can, I use text editors to edit my files. The only time I use word processors is when I'm working on a novel and want the revision features, or when I'm doing a school assignment where I need it to print nicely. Text editors are more flexible, and if basic features are all I need, then that's all that I want to be available.

I wouldn't know about EMACS. I wanted to test it but at gnu.org they said "To compile Emacs on Windows, you will need the MingW or Cygwin port of GCC with MingW make..." and that alone scared me simply because I'm not a programmer.
I love text editors and my favourites are Notepad++ and ConTEXT. They are not identical in terms of features so i can't get rid of any of them. Each one does stuff that cannot be done by the other. I like their support for various languages and they are so handy when it comes to PHP, CSS, HTML, Javascript, etc.

There are actually a lot of very powerful text editors out there. I prefer them in a lot of cases where I just don't feel like waiting to open up Microsoft Word or if I just need to make a quick fix... or especially when I write up my code for web design, since I'm stubborn and like to code instead of drag-and-drop. (The resulting code from drag-and-drop programs like Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage usually tend to get quite messy... consequently creating larger files.)

I recommend Notepad++ for those of you who like to code. It colors different keywords so you can easily pick out your lines in your code, and plus, it has tabs so you can work like you work in Firefox!

Well, a text editor can read just about any file type, but alot of files will show up as gibberish computer code or something. Word processors I believe can do the same thing, but some file types will show up differently between the word processor and a text editor. Try opening up a .doc file in Notepad and you will see what I mean. They both perform similar functions, but each one is used for different purposes.

Actually, text editors and word processors have nothing in common, except the fact that they receive users' input and save it to files, lol.

A (plain) text editor displays and saves a document regardless of the type of document... Everything is plain text, and nothing more is saved than what you see on the screen. So, if you write "thing" and save it to a file, no matter what text editor you use to view it aftewards, it will always display like "thing".
So, the text editor is a very flexible tool... You can edit HTML files, XML, CSS, and most config files which use plain text format. Also, programming languages read plain text files, so these programs are recommended to edit your code.
Even emails can be written in these programs... besides, email was originally plain text! Nowadays people cram all kinds of useless junk in their emails without even knowing it -> they use formatting in emails, but that's another matter... perhaps I'll talk about it in another post :)

As for word processors, these tools take more things into account... First, they save the text you wrote... Then, they can save the formatting you applied, the revisions made to the document, keep track of headers, footers, page layout and things like that. This means that what is saved to the file is much more than just what you wrote... So, if you try opening a .doc file (for example) in notepad, it will look like Hell lol.

We might say that text editors are text-only and word processors are more like publishing tools, as they manage much more things than the text itself (page, etc)

There's another option for those interested... It's called typesetting, and it is a system used in production of professional documents and books. The most used system for this is called LaTeX... basically, you write an input file with code that describes your document's structure and text... and the Typesetting engine outputs a high-quality, professional-looking PDF formatted and ready to print.
An example Latex file would say:


As for the editors, processors and such things... My favourites are:
VIM (for almost everything, including typesetting)
OOo Writer/MSO Word 2003 for quick documents that need formatting.