A text editor is a program that enables you to write plain text files (a text file is a file that consists of lines
of text comprised mainly of the characters that you can type on a keyboard). A common extension for text files is .txt, although the Java source files that we are creating in this course are also examples of text files and use the extension .java. There are many text editors that are freely available for you to use. For example, Windows provides a very simple text editor called Notepad (that you can find under the Accessories menu). However, this is not a very good editor for writing source code because it doesn’t support useful features such as syntax-‐colouring, auto-‐indentation and brace highlighting. Notepad++ is a freely available text editor for Windows, and is the editor we will be using in the labs to write our Java source code.