Text editors are applications which are used strictly for editing and
transforming text. In this context, "text" means a document which
contains any arbitrary combination of characters, including letters,
numbers, punctuation marks, and other symbols. Some examples include
PostScript text files, BinHex or uuencoded data files, program source
code files, or documents such as this one. The functional emphasis for
a text editor is on manipulation of characters and lines (often within
very large files), rather than words or other units of written
language. This of course does not imply that text editors cannot or
should not have word-oriented functions as well, but rather that they
must handle a variety of arbitrary types of file content which word
processors are not optimized for.

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