What Is A Text Editor?

Date First Published: 8th March 2024

Topic: Computer Systems

Subtopic: Computer Software

Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 3/10

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

• 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.

• 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.

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