Source-code editor

Source-code editors have features specifically designed to simplify and speed up typing of source code, such as syntax highlighting, indentation, autocomplete and brace matching functionality.

These editors also provide a convenient way to run a compiler, interpreter, debugger, or other program relevant for the software-development process.

For this reason, strict structure editors are not popular for source code editing, though some IDEs provide similar functionality.

Such tokenizing editors later uncompress the source code when viewing it, possibly prettyprinting it with consistent capitalization and spacing.

IBM's LPEX (Live Parsing Extensible Editor)[7] was based on LEXX and ran on VM/CMS, OS/2, OS/400, Windows, and Java[8] Although the initial public release of vim was in 1991, the syntax highlighting feature was not introduced until version 5.0 in 1998.

[14] Many source-code editors and IDEs have been involved in ongoing user arguments, sometimes referred to jovially as "holy wars" by the programming community.