Editors, Composers & Word Processors

Flat Text Editors

A flat text editor is an editor that uses only the 256 characters of the ASCII standard. So there is not much possibility for extremely fancy formatting in the source code. It is your typesetting, i.e. the HTML language that has to do that for you.

Mini-Editors: pico, xedit: Pico is the editor used by pine and xedit looks like an "emacs-stripped-to-the-bone
Powerfull Editors: vi and emacs: Brilliant editors, but with a rather steep learning curve in the beginning, especially vi.
Wordpad Like Editor: TextEdit

Composers

Composers are quite handy, but tend to create very messy code that is quite hard to read afterwards.

Netscape Composer: Was extremely bad in the bast. Seems to have gotten better.
Mozilla Composer: Appears to be stable.
Micro$oft Frontpage: Getting better with every release, no Unix version available.

Word Processors

Micro$oft Word: Ok, but very messy output, tends to mess up tables and footnotes. Other commands are usually translated appropriately, but with lots of space in between paragraphs. In a way, when you choose "Save as HTML", you are using Word as a composer.