Using the Text Editor

How to use the Pfe32 text editor

Have you found your text editor? The text editor you have is called Pfe32. It is either on your desktop or in the Utilities folder which is on your desktop. If you don't have Pfe32, you can also use the editor Notepad that comes with Windows 95.

To use Pfe32, you double-click on it to start the program, and then type in the information you want to put in the document. Remember that to create a document, you have to use the New command in the File pull-down menu at the top of the window labeled Programmer's File Editor.

So how do you save a document? To save the document that you create, you need to use the "Save" command, also under the "File" pull-down menu, and give it a name. If you are creating a web page, then give it the name ".html" where is some name of your choice. Remember to always save your document files in the appropriate project folder. Otherwise, you'll have a hard time finding your files. I put all these web pages in my "Riner pages" folder.

So what is a text editor good for? It doesn't do fancy formatting of your document such as double spacing your lines. It doesn't make large bold characters in different interesting fonts. It doesn't underline your words, or format your paragraphs. It doesn't provide conveniences such as word wrap, which sends you to the next line when you reach the end of the line. It definitely doesn't make your document pretty. So why would you want to use a text editor? I asked Rayzer that question, and you know what he said. He said "It makes programs."

"Big deal," I said to him. Then I thought about it a moment and had to ask him, "Uhh Rayzer, what's a program?"

"A program is a file that tells a computer how to do something." Rayzer was very patient with me as I climbed up on his shoulder. He had warm broad shoulders that made a great platform from which to peer down at what he was typing on the screen.

"You see Spinner, a computer isn't very independent. It can do millions of additions or subtractions, draw all that fancy graphics, play lots of music, but only because someone, somewhere has told it how to do what it is asked to do. Someone has written a program to tell it exactly how to respond when something happens."

"Now a word processor like Microsoft Word makes documents pretty for people so it looks good when they print it out for books, snail-mail letters, and office memos. But a computer doesn't care how pretty a document looks. It just cares whether you spell the right words correctly, that you put special symbols like periods, commas, and keywords in the right place. All it cares about is grammer, what programmers call syntax.

I scratched behind my ears with my left forefeet and scratched under my second right foot with my third right foot. "So what has it got to do with web pages?" I asked.

"A web pages is sort of a program. It has special symbols, words that have special meaning, and syntax that tells your web browser (Internet Explorer) how to show you a web page." Rayzer pointed to his screen. "See, there is a simple web page document in Pfe32. Next to it is the web page it creates."

It was time for me to go back to my job as the logo of SpiderWeb LLC. I climbed down from Rayzer's shoulder and scrambled back over the World Wide Web back to my own web. I would have to think about all that Rayzer had shown me, and use it. Who knows, I could learn to create web pages and progam computers. Wouldn't that be nice, Spinner the Webmaster and Programmer Extraordinaire.