This article provides basic comparisons for notable text editors. More feature details for text editors are available from the Category of text editor features and from the individual products' articles. This article may not be up-to-date or necessarily all-inclusive.
Feature comparisons are made between stable versions of software, not the upcoming versions or beta releases – and are exclusive of any add-ons, extensions or external programs (unless specified in footnotes).
Multiple instances: multiple instances of the program can be opened simultaneously for editing multiple files. Applies both for single document interface (SDI) and multiple document interface (MDI) programs. Also applies for program that has a user interface that looks like multiple instances of the same program (such as some versions of Microsoft Word).
Single document window splitting: window can be split to simultaneously view different areas of a file.
MDI: Overlappable windows: each opened document gets its own fully movable window inside the editor environment.
MDI: Tabbed document interface: multiple documents can be viewed as tabs in a single window.
MDI: Window splitting: splitting application window to show multiple documents (non-overlapping windows).
Syntax highlighting: Displays text in different colors and fonts according to the category of terms.
Function list: Lists all functions from current file in a window or sidebar and allows user to jump directly to the definition of that function for example by double-clicking on the function name in the list. More or less realtime (does not require creating a symbol database, see below).
Symbol database: Database of functions, variable and type definitions, macro definitions etc. in all the files belonging to the software being developed. The database can be created by the editor itself or by an external program such as ctags. The database can be used to instantly locate the definition even if it is in another file.
Bracket matching: Find matching parenthesis or bracket, taking into account nesting.
Auto indentation: May refer to just simple indenting to the same level as the line above, or intelligent indenting that is language specific, e.g., ensuring a given indent style.
Compiler integration: Allows running compilers/linkers/debuggers from within editor, capturing the compiler output and stepping through errors, automatically moving cursor to corresponding location in the source file.
Extra features
Text editor support for other programming features
= Some limit less than available memory (give max size if known)
In general, most text editors do not support large text files. Some restrict themselves to available in-core RAM while others use sophisticated virtual memory management techniques and paging algorithms.[98]
Search in files:
Perform search (and possibly replace) in multiple files on disk, for example on a sub-directory and recursively all the directories below it.
Similar to grep.
Vim: custom maps of Ctrl-1 .. Ctrl-9, Ctrl-0 cannot be set, nor is Control-Shift-<char> distinguished from Ctrl-<char>.[118][119]
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.
Emacs and Pico: pico uses most of Emacs's motion and deletion commands: ^F ^B ^P ^N ^D etc.
Protocol support
Support for editing files over a network or the Internet.
To support specified character encoding, the editor must be able to load, save, view and edit text in the specific encoding and not destroy any characters. For UTF-8 and UTF-16, this requires internal 16-bit character support.
Partial support is indicated if: 1) the editor can only convert the character encoding to internal (8-bit) format for editing.
2) If some encodings are supported only in some platforms.
3) If the editor can only display specific character set (such as OEM) by loading corresponding font, but does not support keyboard entry for that character set.
Support for Right-To-Left (RTL) texts is necessary for editing some languages like Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and Yiddish and the mixture of left to right (LTR) and RTL known as bi-directional (BiDi) support.
Depending on the algorithm used in the programs it might only render the bidirectional text correctly but may not be able to edit them. (e.g. Notepad++ 5.1.3 shows bidirectional texts correctly but cannot edit it and user should change the text direction to RTL to be able to edit RTL texts correctly.)
Right to left (RTL) & bidirectional (bidi) support
^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.
^ abcgedit, NEdit, and SciTE run in the X11 window environment, and therefore do not use the native Aqua look-and-feel when running on macOS.
^Stand alone NSIS installable package is available
^gedit supports single document window splitting via plug‑ins. [1]Archived 2011-12-14 at the Wayback Machine.
^gedit supports multiple document window splitting via plug‑ins. [2]Archived 2011-12-14 at the Wayback Machine.
^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 plug‑in.
^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.
^mined supports Copy/Paste between multiple documents in separate windows, when these documents are in separate terminal windows
^ abEmacs supports spell checking via the external programs ispell, aspell, or Hunspell.
^jEdit supports spell checking via an external plug‑in.
^JOE supports spell checking via the ispell or aspell external plug‑ins.
^JOE uses a non-standard regular expression syntax.
^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.
^Komodo Edit is based on Scintilla and may support virtual space similar to Geany and Notepad++ ([5])
^Komodo IDE is based on Scintilla and may support virtual space similar to Geany and Notepad++ ([6])
^LE can pipe text through the GNU recode(1) utility
^Metapad spell checking by calling external program Aspell.
^mined supports multiple lines in search and replacement expressions.
^mined can convert the encoding format when using the Copy & Paste feature between multiple documents (that have different encodings).
^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.
^ abcIt is possible to start external applications from inside Sam and display their return values.
^Scintilla-based editors such as SciTE, Notepad2 and Notepad++ do not support alternation (
^UltraEdit uses the Boost C++ regex library. While Boost supports backreferences past \9 with \g{10}, UltraEdit has not yet implemented this feature.
^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.
^Vim version 7 supports spell checking natively. Earlier versions require a script.[66]
^Visual Studio Code does not support virtual space, and rectangular selection beyond line endings is not possible.
^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.
^The Semware Editor: Auto complete: Supported via supplied/user-created lists.
^The Semware Editor: Text folding: Compressed view possible.
^Kate: Line length is limited by default. The limit can be removed, but long lines may cause poor performance.[86]
^LE text editor locks the file and warns if someone else has changed the file
^LE text editor can view and edit large files or their parts in mmap-shared mode
^UltraEdit has no real limit on file size - and can easily open, edit, and save large text files in excess of 4 GB! [8].
^2GB with 32 Bits, on a 64 Bit system it depends on the available virtual memory.
^Emacs: 64-bit compilation on 64-bit OS can handle 2 GB files, otherwise the limit is 512 MiB. [9]
^It is possible to customize all Gedit shortcuts because it is Gtk based.
^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.
^In SciTE, custom keystrokes may be assigned to Lua scripts, external programs or lexers (highlighters).
^SlickEdit provides emulation of Visual Studio, Visual C++ 6, CodeWright, Epsilon and ISPF key bindings in addition to those given in the table.
^SlickEdit supports CodeWarrior, Xcode and BBEdit key binding emulation.
^SlickEdit includes support of vi key bindings, the ex command line and some, but not all Vim extensions.
^Vim emulates vi keys fully when in 'compatible' mode
^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).
^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).
^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.
(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.
^ abmined: 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
^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.
^Notepad++ 6.3.3Archived 2013-11-26 at the Wayback Machine and above support spell checking via the DSpellCheck plug‑in, which is included with the default package.
^"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 FAQsArchived 2019-07-29 at the Wayback Machine.
^"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.
^"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.
^"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 FAQsArchived 2019-10-10 at the Wayback Machine.
^ abGNU Emacs can have Wordstar emulation, with the command M-x wordstar-mode, as found from ws-mode.el retrieved 2017‑03‑14. See also the "Emulation" section of the previous GNU Emacs manual. The WordStar mode, however, has been obsolete since GNU Emacs 24.5.
^"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 [...].
^"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.
