Editors

Periodically the question of which editor to use for TEI tasks arises on the TEI mailing list. There is no single answer to this question, but this page attempts to help you frame the question correctly.

Before thinking about an editor, you should think about who is going to be using it, how often, for what and where.

Those from a technical background are already likely to have a preferred programmable editor. Those from a non-technical background are likely to be more interested in ease of use. Occasional or temporary users are going to what a program that works as similarly as possible to the other applications they use, whereas full-time permanent users are more likely to get a benefit from more powerful editor, even if it has a learning curve. Projects which use large XML files need to be aware that some editors struggle with large XML files. The sed editor (see below) is a special case, allowing for truly arbitrary sizes. Users who need to edit files directly on remote servers may need vt100-capable editors (emacs, vi, sed, etc).

Editors for TEI, sorted by Beginner-friendliness

Name	Operating Systems	FLOSS?	Explicit support for XML	Explicit support for TEI	URL	Projects Using	Beginner-friendliness (scale 1-10, 1=hard)	Notes
UltraEdit	Win, Linux	No	Yes	No	[1]		9	customizable for TEI-support; can handle extremely large files; powerful regex/multi-file replace; macro recording
TextPad (4.73)	Win	No	No	No	[2]	TCP	9	PRO: simple interface, powerful regex/multi-file replace, search-in-files, primary and secondary sort, uniq, diff, hotlinked search results, syntax coloring. CON: no utf-8 support.
Emeditor	Win	No	No	No	[3]	TCP	9	PRO: large-file support, utf-8 support, diff.
EditPad Pro	Win	No	No	No	[4]	TCP	8	PRO: UTF-8 support, excellent character-encoding conversions, syntax coloring, regex search/replace, XML 'content folding', handles large files well. CON: no search-in-files, sort, uniq, or diff.
Open XML Editor	Win	Yes	Yes	No	[5]		8	Text-based editing, DTD validation, various input encodings but output only in UTF-8, plugin of Saxon XSLT processor and external hex editor possible
oXygen	all (Java)	No	Yes	Yes	[6]	WWP DHQ	8	Can validate using DTD, W3C schema, RELAX NG, and Schematron; can run XSL transformations on file; WYSIWYG mode using CSS
XMLcopyEditor	Win, Ubuntu	Yes	Yes	Yes	[7]	TCP	7	Free; validates to DTD, XSD, Relax.ng
epcEdit	Win, Linux, Solaris	No	Yes	No	[8]	TCP	7	Free; also supports SGML; feels a bit like XMetaL
jEdit	all (Java)	Yes	Yes	Yes	[9]	NZETC	7	XML use requires plugins, and only supports DTDs
Emacs	Mac, Win, Linux, Solaris	Yes	Yes	No	[10]	NZETC WWP	3	(See also TEIEmacs) Best mode for TEI XML is nXML, using RELAX NG compact schemas. For Mac look for Aquamacs package
vi	Mac, Win, Linux, Solaris	Yes	No	No	[11]		1
sed	Mac, Win, Linux, Solaris	Yes	No	No	[12]		-1
Notepad++	Win	Yes			[13]
Sacodeyl Annotator	all (Java)				[14]
Serna Free		Yes	Yes	Yes	[15]
TextMate	MacOS	No		No	[16]			An extension is needed for XML editing
XmlBlueprint	Win				[17]
XMLmind	all (Java)	No	Yes	No	[18]			A free version exists.
XMLSpy	all (Java)	No	Yes	No	[19]
XmlWriter	Win				[20]
Editix	Win, Linux, MacOS	No	Yes	No	[21]			A free Lite version exists.
Exchanger XML Editor	all (Java)				[22]

Humour

Tension between emacs and vi users is longstanding and well summarised on the Editor war Wikipedia page. vi was included in the POSIX standard, whereas emacs was not, perhaps because vi was historically available in multiple implementations from multiple vendors. The following cartoon illustrates the commonly-held assumptions that emacs and vi and very powerful but obscure while their competitors make users do all the work.