What Is A Text Editor?

Date First Published: 8th March 2024

Topic: Computer Systems

Subtopic: Computer Software

Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Easy

Difficulty Level: 3/10

CONTENTS

Advantages and Disadvantages Of Text Editors
Features Of Text Editors

Learn about what a text editor is in this article.

A text editor is a program that allows users to open, edit, and view plain text files. Text editors are usually included as built-in programs by the operating system and software development packages. They are often used to edit configuration files, documentation files, and programming language source code.

Advantages and Disadvantages Of Text Editors

The advantages of text editors are:

They are more suitable for opening extremely large text files. They can open them much easier than a word processor since it does not include the additional text formatting and page layout.
Text editors can include advanced features that change how the text looks in the editor, but not the text itself. These formatting features appear as useful guides for users.

The disadvantages of text editors are:

They lack the text formatting features of word processors, which use rich text files. They cannot be used to change the font, colour, size, or layout of text on a page.
They do not support more advanced features, like multimedia files, spell checking, and grammar checking.

Features Of Text Editors

Common features of text editors are:

Find and replace - Text editors provide features to search and replace strings of text. This can be done individually or in groups of files in opened tabs or a selected folder. Advanced editors can use regular expressions to search and edit text or code.
Cut, copy and paste - Text editors can cut, copy, and paste text from other sources and quickly find and replace text within a file.
Text formatting - Text editors often provide basic visual formatting features such as line wrap, auto-indentation, bullet list formatting using ASCII characters, comment formatting, syntax highlighting and more. This is only for display and does not affect the text file itself.
Undo and redo - Like word processors, text editors provide a way to undo and redo the last edit. Modern or more complex editors usually provide a multiple-level history such that issuing the undo command repeatedly will revert the document to successively older edits.
Ability to jump to a specified line number.

Types Of Text Editors

Different types of text editors used for specific purposes include:

Source code editors - Text editors with additional functionality designed for source code, such as syntax highlighting and code navigation buttons.
HTML editors - Text editors dedicated to the task of creating webpages (e.g. Dreamweaver).
Collaborative editors - Allow multiple users to work on the same document from remote locations over a network. The changes made by individual users are automatically tracked and merged into the document automatically to eliminate the possibility of conflicting edits.
IDEs - These are designed to manage large programming projects. Since they contain a lot of features unnecessary for simple text editing, they are usually only used for programming.