Tooling has come a long way since the first Unix and Unix-like distributions. In the earliest days, writing shell scripts was significantly harder than today: the shells were less powerful, text editors were command-line only and things such as syntax highlighting and autocomplete were non-existent. Today, we have very powerful GUI editors that will help us in our scripting adventures. Why would we want to wait until we run a script to find an error, when a GUI editor could have already shown us the error in advance? Today, using an advanced editor for shell scripting is almost a necessity that we wouldn't want to live without.
We'll describe two text editors in the coming pages: Atom and Notepad++. Both are GUI-based, which we can use for efficient shell scripting. If you have a preference for either already, pick that one...
