A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. Such programs are sometimes known as "notepad" software. Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be used to change files such as configuration files, documentation files and programming language source code.
Bluefish is a free and open-source software advanced text editor with a variety of tools for programming and website development. It supports coding languages including HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, PHP, C, C++, JavaScript, Java, Go, Vala, Ada, D, SQL, Perl, ColdFusion, JSP, Python, Ruby, and shell. It is available for many platforms, including Linux, macOS and Windows, and can be used via integration with GNOME or run as a stand-alone application. Designed as a compromise between plain text editors and full programming IDEs, Bluefish is lightweight, fast and easy to learn, while providing many IDE features. It has been translated into 17 languages.
gedit is a text editor designed for the GNOME desktop environment. It was GNOME's default text editor and part of the GNOME Core Applications until GNOME version 42 in March 2022, which changed the default text editor to GNOME Text Editor. Designed as a general-purpose text editor, gedit emphasizes simplicity and ease of use, with a clean and simple GUI, according to the philosophy of the GNOME project. It includes tools for editing source code and structured text such as markup languages.
HomeSite was an HTML editor originally developed by Nick Bradbury. Unlike WYSIWYG HTML editors such as FrontPage and Dreamweaver, HomeSite was designed for direct editing, or "hand coding", of HTML and other website languages.
jEdit is a free software text editor available under GPL-2.0-or-later. It is written in Java and runs on any operating system with Java support, including BSD, Linux, macOS and Windows.
PHPEdit was a commercial IDE developed by the French company WaterProof SARL. It ran on the Microsoft Windows operating system, and was designed mainly for the PHP language, but supported many other languages such as CSS, HTML, JavaScript, INI, PHPEditScript, PlainText, SQL, XML, and XSLT.
UltraEdit is a commercial text editor for Microsoft Windows, Linux and OS X created in 1994 by the founder of IDM Computer Solutions Inc., Ian D. Mead, and owned by Idera, Inc. since August 2021. The editor contains tools for programmers, including macros, configurable syntax highlighting, code folding, file type conversions, project management, regular expressions for search-and-replace, a column-edit mode, remote editing of files via FTP, interfaces for APIs or command lines of choice, and more. Files can be browsed and edited in tabs, and it also supports Unicode and hex editing mode.
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.
GNU Readline is a software library that provides in-line editing and history capabilities for interactive programs with a command-line interface, such as Bash. It is currently maintained by Chet Ramey as part of the GNU Project.
CSPro, short for the Census and Survey Processing System, is a public domain data processing software package developed by the U.S. Census Bureau and ICF International. Serpro S.A. was involved in past development. Funding for development comes primarily from the U.S. Agency for International Development. The main purpose of this software framework is to design an application for data collection and processing.
Scintilla is a free, open source library that provides a text editing component function, with an emphasis on advanced features for source code editing.
Yasca is an open source program which looks for security vulnerabilities, code-quality, performance, and conformance to best practices in program source code. It leverages external open source programs, such as FindBugs, PMD, JLint, JavaScript Lint, PHPLint, Cppcheck, ClamAV, Pixy, and RATS to scan specific file types, and also contains many custom scanners developed for Yasca. It is a command-line tool that generates reports in HTML, CSV, XML, MySQL, SQLite, and other formats. It is listed as an inactive project at the well-known OWASP security project, and also in a government software security tools review at the U.S Department of Homeland Security web site.
CSS HTML Validator is an HTML editor and CSS editor for Windows that helps web developers create syntactically correct and accessible HTML/HTML5, XHTML, and CSS documents by locating errors, potential problems like browser compatibility issues, and common mistakes. It is also able to check links, check spelling, suggest improvements, alert developers to deprecated, obsolete, or proprietary tags, attributes, and CSS properties, and find issues that can affect search engine optimization.
PyScripter is a free and open-source Python integrated development environment (IDE) for Windows. It is built with Delphi's Object Pascal and Python.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the Perl programming language:
Brackets is a source code editor with a primary focus on web development. Created by Adobe Inc., it is free and open-source software licensed under the MIT License, and is currently maintained on GitHub by open-source developers. It is written in JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Brackets is cross-platform, available for macOS, Windows, and most Linux distributions. The main purpose of Brackets is its live HTML, CSS and JavaScript editing functionality.
Multi-Edit is a commercial text editor for Microsoft Windows created in the 1980s by Todd Johnson. Multi Edit Software obtained ownership rights for the product in October 2002. Multi-Edit contains tools for programmers, including macros, configurable syntax highlighting, code folding, file type conversions, project management, regular expressions, three block highlight modes including column, stream and line modes, remote editing of files via FTP and interfaces for APIs or command lines of choice. The editor uses a tabbed document interface and sessions can be saved.
CudaText, from Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian čuda, is a free open source cross-platform native GUI text and source code editor. CudaText supersedes its predecessor SynWrite, no longer under development.
