Comparison of text editors

This article compares notable text editors. It may not be up-to-date or all-inclusive. Comparisons are between stable versions (not upcoming or beta releases) and are exclusive of any add-ons, extensions or external programs unless otherwise noted.

Other features can be listed via the Category of text editor features.

General attributes

Operating system support

Natural language (localization)

Document interface

The following table identifies the following attributes of an editor that describe its user experience with respect to multiple documents:

Multiple instances

Whether multiple instances of the program can be open at the same time for editing multiple files (one in each instance). Applies both for single-document interface (SDI) and multiple-document interface (MDI). Also, applies for a program that has a user interface that looks like multiple instances of the same program (such as some versions of Word).

Single document window splitting

Whether a window can be split to simultaneously view different areas of a file.

MDI overlappable windows

Whether each open document gets its own fully movable window inside the editor environment.

MDI tabbed document interface

Whether multiple documents can be viewed as tabs in a single window.

MDI window splitting

Whether supports splitting the application window to show multiple documents (non-overlapping windows).

Basic features

Programming features

Additional programming features

Key bindings

Notes:

Vim

Custom maps of Ctrl-1 .. Ctrl-9, Ctrl-0 cannot be set, nor is Control-Shift-<char> distinguished from Ctrl-<char>.^[63][64]

Notepad++

Custom shortcuts of Shift-<char> cannot be set, they need an added modifier such as Ctrl or Alt. i.e. SCI_LINESCROLLUP cannot be bound to "Shift-I"as the "Add"button is greyed out.

Pico

Pico uses most of Emacs's motion and deletion commands: ^F ^B ^P ^N ^D etc.

Protocol support

Character encoding support

The following table identifies notable character encodings that an editor supports – can load, save, view and edit text in the encoding without changing any characters. Partial implies that the editor can only convert the character encoding to internal (8-bit) format for editing, some encodings are supported only in some platforms or the editor can only display a character set (such as OEM) by loading corresponding font, but does not support keyboard entry for that character set.

Right-to-left and bidirectional text

Support for right-to-left (RTL) text is necessary for editing some languages like Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and Yiddish and the mixture of left-to-right (LTR) and RTL known as bidirectional (BiDi). The following table indicates whether an editor supports RTL and BiDi text. Some editors (e.g. Notepad++ 5.1.3) can render bidirectional text but does not support editing it.

Newline support

The following table identifies newline support of editors. The three options are:

CR/LF

Generally, used on Windows.

LF

Generally, used on Unix-like systems (including macOS).^[73]

CR

Generally, used on Classic Mac OS.

See also

• Editor war
• Comparison of word processors
• Comparison of integrated development environments
• Comparison of HTML editors
• Comparison of TeX editors
• Comparison of hex editors
• Comparison of notetaking software
• Comparison of wiki software
• List of text editors
• List of wiki software
• List of personal information managers
• Outliner

Notes

1. ^ last update in OpenBSD repo^[75]
2. ^ No native support, available as a part of the Inferno port for Windows or by using `plan9port` over the WSL.
3. ^ cygwin
4. ^ GEdit, when installed from MacPorts, runs in X11 and, therefore, does not have a native look and feel. However, precompiled native macOS binaries for GEdit may be downloaded from the GEdit project page, or from the GEdit FTP download server.
5. ^ Requires Cygwin or the Windows Subsystem for Linux to run on Windows.
6. ^ gedit, NEdit, and SciTE run in the X11 window environment, and therefore do not use the native Aqua look-and-feel when running on macOS.
7. ^ Stand alone NSIS installable package is available
8. ^ gedit supports single document window splitting via plugins. [1] Archived 2011-12-14 at the Wayback Machine.
9. ^ gedit supports multiple document window splitting via plugins. [2] Archived 2011-12-14 at the Wayback Machine.
10. ^ GNU Emacs 27.1 includes built-in support for tab bar (per-frame) and tab-line (per-window). Earlier versions of GNU Emacs can use a tabbed document interface in a non OS-native way using the Tabbar plugin.
11. ^ GNU Emacs can support a tabbed document interface modelled after GNU Screen using the elscreen Archived 2008-01-17 at the Wayback Machine package.
12. ^ JOE supports editing multiple files but only seeing one of them, and switching to others via Ctrl+K+N, which is functionally equivalent to having tabs but no visible tab bar.
13. ^ mined supports Copy/Paste between multiple documents in separate windows, when these documents are in separate terminal windows
14. ^ SciTE_max_buffers
15. ^ Vim Provided GVim is used.
16. ^ Vim version 7 supports a tabbed document interface. Earlier versions can emulate tabs through scripts, for example.^[76]
17. ^ Acme can invoke external commands and display their return values in order to integrate additional functionality.
18. ^ ConTEXT does not support regular expression backreferences in its search and replace function. [3] Archived 2007-12-18 at archive.today
19. ^ ConTEXT only supports converting text to UTF-16. Also, it can only use one type of new-line format if converting to UTF-16.
20. ^ Geany supports spell checking via a plugin
21. ^ gedit supports spell checking via a plugin, which is distributed with gedit.
22. ^ gedit supports Regex-based find & replace via plugins ([4] Archived 2011-12-14 at the Wayback Machine).
23. ^ Emacs supports spell checking via the external programs ispell, aspell, or Hunspell.
24. ^ jEdit supports spell checking via an external plugin.
25. ^ JOE supports spell checking via the ispell or aspell external plugins.
26. ^ JOE uses a non-standard regular expression syntax.
27. ^ JOE can easily pipe text through the GNU recode(1) utility; it detects locale settings and allows editing in any encoding set up by the environment.
28. ^ Komodo Edit is based on Scintilla and may support virtual space similar to Geany and Notepad++ ([5])
29. ^ Komodo IDE is based on Scintilla and may support virtual space similar to Geany and Notepad++ ([6])
30. ^ LE can pipe text through the GNU recode(1) utility
31. ^ Metapad spell checking by calling external program Aspell.
32. ^ mined supports multiple lines in search and replacement expressions.
33. ^ mined can convert the encoding format when using the Copy & Paste feature between multiple documents (that have different encodings).
34. ^ mined supports new-line conversion via a command-line option or from the menu. Files with mixed newline types can be edited transparently; different kinds of new-line have different visual indications.
35. ^ It is possible to start external applications from inside Sam and display their return values.
36. ^ Scintilla-based editors such as SciTE, Notepad2 and Notepad++ do not support alternation (
37. ^ UltraEdit uses the Boost C++ regex library. While Boost supports backreferences past \9 with \g{10}, UltraEdit has not yet implemented this feature.
38. ^ VEDIT 6.2 comes with Scribe spelling checker which has been written entirely in Vedit macro language. In addition, macro package for integrating Aspell can be downloaded here.
39. ^ Vim version 7 supports spell checking natively. Earlier versions require a script.^[77]
40. ^ Visual Studio Code does not support virtual space, and rectangular selection beyond line endings is not possible.
41. ^ Acme's auto-completion only works on file names.
42. ^ bluefish: Configurable via the outputbox feature.
43. ^ With external tool OpenCTags
44. ^ ed can invoke external commands, like a compiler.
45. ^ EmEditor Professional supports Auto Complete via plugins (32-bit or 64-bit).
46. ^ Geany uses its own tags file format, not compatible with ctags, see the manual.
47. ^ gedit-folding: Folding plugin for Gedit
48. ^ gedit: Compiler integration: Functionality in plugins installed with gedit.
49. ^ make can be launched from the LE text editor, but the output is not captured
50. ^ Evaluates expressions in some dynamic languages such as Clojure, Python and Javascript in realtime
51. ^ mined: Syntax highlighting: HTML/XML, Javascript, JSP.
52. ^ Notepad++ comes with Function List support, and it can be enhanced via plugins.
53. ^ Notepad++ installs with auto complete list for multiple programming languages. Has user option to add additional personalized auto complete list(s).
54. ^ Function list (and stuff) available in Ru-Board build, ver 1.79.66Ru and later
55. ^ TextMate: Auto complete: Supported language bundles
56. ^ Textpad uses an add-on ([7])
57. ^ TextWrangler can integrate with a compiler if you write a shell script that takes flag input of the code and compiles it. You place this in ~/Library/Application Support/TextWrangler/Unix Support/Unix Filters/. It should show in the #! menu.
58. ^ The Semware Editor: Auto complete: Supported via supplied/user-created lists.
59. ^ The Semware Editor: Text folding: Compressed view possible.
60. ^ Not in the Linux version.
61. ^ Vedit: Auto complete: Template editing, plus 3rd party macro for expanding symbols from tags database.
62. ^ Alpha Macro support via AppleScript, Tcl or text factories.
63. ^ BBEdit Macro support via AppleScript, Perl, Python, Lasso, shell scripts or text factories.
64. ^ Coda offers macros via AppleScript, text "clips,"or plugins (Cocoa apps or any installed scripting language).
65. ^ name
66. ^ Cssed Macro support via Python.
67. ^ jEdit: Limited by Java heap size.^[78]
68. ^ Kate: Line length is limited by default. The limit can be removed, but long lines may cause poor performance.^[79]
69. ^ LE text editor locks the file and warns if someone else has changed the file
70. ^ LE text editor can view and edit large files or their parts in mmap-shared mode
71. ^ UltraEdit has no real limit on file size - and can easily open, edit, and save large text files in excess of 4 GB! [8].
72. ^ 2GB with 32 Bits, on a 64 Bit system it depends on the available virtual memory.
73. ^ Emacs: 64-bit compilation on 64-bit OS can handle 2 GB files, otherwise the limit is 512 MiB. [9]
74. ^ It is possible to customize all Gedit shortcuts because it is Gtk based.
75. ^ The JED base release comes with a basic CUA emulation, but it doesn't bother to bind lots of useful editor features. Also, like some other editors, 1 side of a region must be at the cursor. The main extension collections jedmodes/jed-extra and the "Red Project" have improved versions, tackling the former problem in particular.
76. ^ In SciTE, custom keystrokes may be assigned to Lua scripts, external programs or lexers (highlighters).
77. ^ SlickEdit provides emulation of Visual Studio, Visual C++ 6, CodeWright, Epsilon and ISPF key bindings in addition to those given in the table.
78. ^ SlickEdit supports CodeWarrior, Xcode and BBEdit key binding emulation.
79. ^ SlickEdit includes support of vi key bindings, the ex command line and some, but not all Vim extensions.
80. ^ Vim emulates vi keys fully when in 'compatible' mode
81. ^ Vim With a script^[80]
82. ^ when choosing e.g. Terminal font
83. ^ GNU Emacs: While GNU Emacs supports the UTF-8 encoding, it doesn't fully support the Unicode standard, since it doesn't fully support the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (see comment in the 'Right-to-left and bidirectional text' section below).
84. ^ GNU Emacs: While GNU Emacs supports the UTF-16 encoding, it doesn't fully support the Unicode standard, since it doesn't fully support the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (see comment in the 'Right-to-left and bidirectional text' section below).
85. ^ JEDs Windows version comes with a pair of scripts that can convert UTF-16 text files (actually anything iconv can convert) to and from JED's internal UTF-8. The Red Project releases include an enhanced version of these scripts.
86. ^ nvi Gentoo
87. ^ SciTE can open files in UTF or one single-byte encoding specified in a configuration file.
88. ^ TextPad can load and save UTF-8 and UTF-16 text files, but cannot use or even preserve characters outside of the system encoding.^[81]
89. ^ when choosing e.g. New Courier font
90. ^ Vedit can convert UTF-8 and UTF-16 files to Windows character set and back. Characters not included in Windows charset can be preserved.
91. ^ Vim supports EBCDIC when compiled on a system that uses the EBCDIC character set.
92. ^ from version 21.5.29
93. ^ GNU Emacs
    
    (1) According to a comment in the source file where the bidi support is implemented (http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/src/bidi.c accessed August 15, 2017), GNU Emacs doesn't fully conform to the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (Unicode Annex #9, a.k.a. UAX #9) in the way it wraps the lines of a bidi paragraph: "we are violating paragraph 3.4 of UAX#9. which mandates that line breaking shall be done before reordering each screen line separately."
    
    (2) According to the online GNU Emacs manual (section 22.19 Bidirectional Editing, accessed August 15, 2017), for the purpose of changing paragraph direction, "Paragraph boundaries are empty lines, i.e., lines consisting entirely of whitespace character". This contrasts with the otherwise ubiquitous convention of regarding the newline marker (LF on Unix derivatives, including macOS, and CR+LF on Windows) as the paragraph separator in plain text documents. However starting with version 26.0.50, the bidi paragraph separator can be customized.
94. ^ mined: supports bidi in cooperation with bidi terminal (mlterm, mintty); also supports "poor man's bidi mode"(automatic visual text order right-to-left input) in normal terminal
95. ^ Notepadpp: Scintilla (Notepad++'s Engine) does not really support bidirectional editing ... Some bidirectional text support added in 4.1.0. https://sourceforge.net/p/scintilla/bugs/757/#01c9
96. ^ GNU Emacs: GNU Emacs doesn't regard the newline marker as a paragraph separator in bidi texts. See comment in the 'Right-to-left and bidirectional text' section.

References

1. ^ "Epsilon 14 Update Information". Lugaru Software, Ltd.. Retrieved 2020-10-22.
2. ^ "New Features in Epsilon 13". www.lugaru.com
3. ^ "JOE - Joe's own editor". JOE - Joe's own editor / Mercurial / [2e4f45] /po. Retrieved 23 October 2015.
4. ^ "KDE Localization - Apps » stable » kate.po". l10n.kde.org
5. ^ "Metapad language plugins". liquidninja.com
6. ^ "Localised SciTE". scintilla.org
7. ^ "Geany"
8. ^ "Gedit/Plugins/ColumnMode - GNOME Wiki!". Archived from the original on 2012-01-11.
9. ^ "Virtual space for rectangular selections (at least)". Stack Exchange. Retrieved 13 March 2023.
10. ^ "Selecting Text"
11. ^ "GitHub - rschroll/lt-spelling: Spell check plugin for Light Table.". April 29, 2015. – via GitHub.
12. ^ "Super User's BSD Cross Reference: /OpenBSD/usr.bin/mg/re_search.c". bxr.su
13. ^ NEdit supports spell checking via a plugin
14. ^ Notepad++ 6.3.3 Archived 2013-11-26 at the Wayback Machine and above support spell checking via the DSpellCheck plugin, which is included with the default package.
15. ^ SubEthaEdit supports advanced block editing, including multi-line typing and non-contiguous block selections.
16. ^ "Virtual space". 28 March 2012.
17. ^ "Virtual Space is not implemented. · Issue #13960 · microsoft/Vscode". GitHub
18. ^ "GitHub - ffes/npptags: Universal Ctags plug-in for Notepad++.". March 7, 2019. – via GitHub.
19. ^ "NotePad++ Plugin. Allows to connect to SQL Servers, execute SQL commands and views results: vladk1973/npp.connections". June 21, 2019. – via GitHub.
20. ^ "TSE-Pro Files". www.semware.com
21. ^ Vim has a popular TagList plugin that provides a function list.
22. ^ "Feature Request: Integrated Shell/Terminal Access · Issue #14490 · atom/atom". GitHub
23. ^ "atom-macros". Atom. 8 June 2022.
24. ^ "Multi-line find and replace in project · Issue #398 · atom/find-and-replace". GitHub
25. ^ "Handling large files presents no intrinsic problems for BBEdit, though some specific operations may be limited when dealing with files over 2GB in size." BBEdit FAQs Archived 2019-07-29 at the Wayback Machine.
26. ^ "Gedit File Search Plugin". oliver.github.io
27. ^ "GNU Emacs 23.2 NEWS -- history of user-visible changes."
28. ^ "Buffers" A buffer's size cannot be larger than some maximum, which is defined by the largest buffer position representable by Emacs integers. This is because Emacs tracks buffer positions using that data type. For typical 64-bit machines, this maximum buffer size is 2^{61} - 2 bytes, or about 2 EiB. For typical 32-bit machines, the maximum is usually 2^{29} - 2 bytes, or about 512 MiB. Buffer sizes are also limited by the amount of memory in the system.
29. ^ "Does Emacs have problems with large files?"
30. ^ "GNU emacs manual - Narrowing"
31. ^ "The JED Editor". Archived from the original on 2012-01-05. Retrieved 2009-12-08.
32. ^ "JOE - Joe's Own Editor". JOE - Joe's own editor / Mercurial / [2e4f45] /docs/man.md. Retrieved 23 October 2015. The search covers all loaded buffers.
33. ^ kwrite-devel, Large Files open slowly due to futile Syntax-Highlighting
34. ^ "Macros". docs.activestate.com
35. ^ Lines longer than ~700 characters frequently cause crashes. KatePart documentation Archived 2018-01-07 at the Wayback Machine (which is also the KWrite documentation, see here Archived 2018-01-07 at the Wayback Machine)
36. ^ metapad FAQ, Loading Large Files
37. ^ "Notepad++ - How to Remotely work on the Same File in Real Time". 11 January 2016. Archived 2021-12-12 at the Wayback Machine. – via www.youtube.com.
38. ^ "Text limit". Community. January 16, 2019.
39. ^ "Configurable through settings"
40. ^ "PSPad forum / Bug report / Hlášení chyb / cannot open large file". forum.pspad.com
41. ^ "Edit large mbox files - MozillaZine Knowledge Base". kb.mozillazine.org
42. ^ "TextWrangler is a RAM-based editor, and it uses system memory to hold open files. TextWrangler also represents open documents as Unicode, which uses two bytes for each character. Combined with an internal Mac OS X limitation, this means that you can open files up to 384 megabytes in size." TextWrangler FAQs Archived 2019-10-10 at the Wayback Machine.
43. ^ "GitHub - FredKSchott/CoVim: Collaborative Editing for Vim.". November 13, 2019. – via GitHub.
44. ^ "Live Share - Visual Studio Marketplace". marketplace.visualstudio.com
45. ^ "Bare Bones Software | BBEdit Comparison Chart". www.barebones.com
46. ^ "Bare Bones Software | Features". www.barebones.com
47. ^ pico uses most of Emacs's motion and deletion commands: ^F ^B ^P ^N ^D etc. See Pico: A Unix text editor Archived 20120905 at the Wayback Machine retrieved 20120109.
48. ^ GNU Emacs can have Wordstar emulation, with the command M-x wordstar-mode, as found from ws-mode.el retrieved 20170314. See also the "Emulation" section of the previous GNU Emacs manual. The WordStar mode, however, has been obsolete since GNU Emacs 24.5.
49. ^ "AC.27 Emulation". GNU Emacs manual. Retrieved 2021-12-06.
50. ^ "JOE - Joe's Own Editor". JOE - Joe's own editor / Mercurial / [2e4f45] /docs/man.md. Retrieved 23 October 2015. JOE also emulates several other editors. JSTAR is a close imitation of WordStar [...]. JPICO is a close imitation of the Pine mailing system's PICO editor [...]. JMACS is a GNU-EMACS imitation. [...] Key binding tables are defined. You can define as many as you like [...].
51. ^ "Usenet". www.megalextoria.com
52. ^ Kate supports an optional VI Input Mode Archived 20090228 at the Wayback Machine.
53. ^ pico (and nano) uses most of Emacs's motion and deletion commands: ^F ^B ^P ^N ^D etc. See Pico: A Unix text editor Archived 20120905 at the Wayback Machine retrieved 20120109.
54. ^ "Bare Bones Software | TextWrangler Features". www.barebones.com. Archived from the original on 2017-08-11. Retrieved 2009-06-05.
55. ^ Vedit: Old Unix and QNX versions could emulate Vi 100%. Windows version doesn't come with vi emulation.
56. ^ "GitHub - fabi1cazenave/cua-mode.vim: Make CTRL-ZXCV behave like in Notepad.". February 26, 2019. – via GitHub.
57. ^ "GitHub - likaci/ViFinder: Vim like Keybinding FileManager for OS X.". October 13, 2019. – via GitHub.
58. ^ "Vim distribution optimized for writing". Sep 16, 2021. – via GitHub.
59. ^ "brief.vim - Brief editor key binding emulation in Vim : vim online". www.vim.org
60. ^ "Vim - Visual Studio Marketplace". marketplace.visualstudio.com
61. ^ "Emacs - Visual Studio Marketplace". marketplace.visualstudio.com
62. ^ "Brief Editor Keymap Emulation - Visual Studio Marketplace". marketplace.visualstudio.com
63. ^ "Vim - General - unable to map ctrl-1". vim.1045645.n5.nabble.com. Archived from the original on 2017-12-01. Retrieved 2017-11-30.
64. ^ "Vim - General - How to map (say) Ctrl-Shift-B". vim.1045645.n5.nabble.com. Archived from the original on 2017-12-01. Retrieved 2017-11-30.
65. ^ Text Editor Features Archived 2007-12-18 at archive.today at ConTEXT.cx
66. ^ jEdit FTP and SFTP are supported via the FTP plugin.
67. ^ jEdit: "HTTP is supported natively"
68. ^ "TED Notepad". jsimlo.sk
69. ^ "Bare Bones Software | TextWrangler Tour". www.barebones.com. Archived from the original on 2019-11-29. Retrieved 2019-11-16.
70. ^ Vim Supported via netrw plugin distributed in the standard Vim installation.
71. ^ "Remote Workspace - Visual Studio Marketplace". marketplace.visualstudio.com. Archived from the original on 2019-05-10. Retrieved 2019-05-09.
72. ^ "Support EBCDIC encodings · Issue #49891 · microsoft/vscode". GitHub
73. ^ "Did Mac OS Lion switch to using line feeds (LF '\n') for line breaks instead of carriage returns (CR '\r')?". Super User
74. ^ "JOE - Joe's Own Editor". JOE - Joe's own editor / Mercurial / [2e4f45] /docs/man.md. Retrieved 23 October 2015. character sets must use LF (0x0A) or CR-LF (0x0D - 0x0A) as line terminators [...]. [...] character sets which use CR terminated lines (MACs) will not yet work.
75. ^ "src/usr.bin/mg at master · openbsd/src". GitHub. Retrieved 2020-10-21.
76. ^ "TabBar - Plugin to add tab bar ( derived from miniBufExplorer). : vim online". www.vim.org
77. ^ "Engspchk - Spelling checker: On-the-fly spell checking, multi-language, alternate spellings : vim online". www.vim.org
78. ^ "'Re: [ jEdit-users ] Big file take AGES' - MARC". marc.info
79. ^ "The Kate Handbook"
80. ^ "Vimacs - Vim-Improved eMACS: Emacs emulation for Vim : vim online". www.vim.org
81. ^ "Community :: View topic - Unicode Conformance". forums.textpad.com