Now, what about minimal features for text editors? Okay, now we have to make two distinctions here. Basic text editors for any user, and text editors for programmers.
Basic text editors for any user:
- Text entry (obvious)
- Visual browsing of already entered text
- Visual editing of already entered text
- Mouse support
- Menu of available commands
- Delete region
- Cut, copy, and paste
- Multi-level undo and redo
- Search and replace
- Spell checking on demand
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Continuous spell checking
- Optional, typically used on phones: Abbreviations/auto-type/autocompletion
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Word processors and smartphones only: Auto-correction
- Lookup a word in a dictionary or other reference
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Follow a hyperlink
- Graphical widgets for rich text editing
Text editors for programmers:
- Includes all features listed above, except the following:
- Auto-correction
- Command-line/command-based text editing
- Command-line/command-based rich text editing
- Hot-keys for rich text editing
- Regular expression search and replace
- Auto-indentation, reformatting of regions
- Keyboard macros
- Source debugger
- Extensibility/programmability for plugins and extensions
Again, I reiterate, because this is important! Curiously, drawing programs aren’t very popular on smartphones, even though they are fairly popular on tablets, laptops, and desktops. Text entry and voice are the almost exclusive forms of user input on a smartphone. Photos are the exclusive form of more general graphical input on a smartphone, and the touchscreen is exclusively used for navigating graphical user interfaces (either via traditional push buttons or modern gestures), not drawing.
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Footnote: Perhaps I should qualify this, traditionally they were one of the most popular programs on personal computers, but the advent of many modern information worker jobs has since decreased their popularity among average desktop and laptop users. Among the subset of users who are recreational computer users, especially children, drawing programs still are popular. However, in modern times, the advent of easy access to broadband Internet has decreased the popularity of drawing programs even among recreational computer users, even among children. Suffice it to say, “the Internet” has a much different user interface, one that is espoused most distinctively in my assessment of the popularity of user interface modes in smartphones: The touch interface is used to navigate the ‘mechanics” of the smartphone, but the actual content communication of the Internet is exclusively text, audio, photos, and video. No drawings. So how are drawings ever communicated on the Internet? The drawing is done on paper, and a photo of the paper is taken, with a smartphone, of course.
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Indeed, this does make diagramming software a distinct quality of laptop and desktop computing. The concept simply isn’t exercised in the arena of smartphones. What about tablets? I have yet to hear of anyone doing extensive diagramming on a tablet. I believe tablets are mainly used for art drawing, not technical drawing.