Whats the difference between an editor and a word processor?
An editor shows you the characters you type, exactly as you type them. It puts new-line characters in when you hit the Enter key, and only when you hit the Enter key. Its ultimate aim is to give you exact control of plain text. EDIT in DOS, Notepad in Windows, vi and emacs in *nix, Tex-Edit Plus and BBEdit Lite in Mac, are all editors. A word processor, in addition to entering the characters, also lets you change the font, the size of individual words, and whether they are italic or bold. It doesn’t generally want individual line-ends put in on each line; it just rewraps the text as you change it. Its ultimate aim is to print your document on paper with full formatting facilities. WordPerfect for MS-DOS and Windows, MS-Word for Windows and Mac, AbiWord for Windows and Linux, and Nisus Writer for Mac are all word processors.
