This article may be too long to read and navigate comfortably. Consider splitting content into sub-articles, condensing it, or adding subheadings. Please discuss this issue on the article's talk page.(September 2009)
This article provides basic comparisons for common 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 SDI and 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. (Needs clarification?)
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.[87]
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 (like Hebrew, Arabic, Persian) and the mixture of left to right (LTR) and RTL known as bidirectional (bidi) support.
Depending on the algorithm used in the programs they 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 you cannot edit it and you should change the window direction to be able to edit right to left 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 Mac OS X binaries for GEdit may be downloaded from the GEdit project page, or from the GEdit FTP download server.
^ abcgedit, NEdit, SciTE, and SlickEdit run in the X11 window environment, and therefore do not use the native Aqua look-and-feel when running on Mac OS X.
^The SemWare Editor (TSE): Linux beta version in progress.
^gedit supports single document window splitting via plugins. [2].
^gedit supports multiple document window splitting via plugins. [3].
^GNU Emacs can use a tabbed document interface in a non OS-native way, using the tabbar plug-in.
^GNU Emacs can support a tabbed document interface modelled after GNU Screen using the elscreen package.
^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
^SciTE has a maximum number of buffers, which can only be set as high as 100.
^gedit supports spell checking via a plugin, which is distributed with gedit.
^gedit supports Regex-based find & replace via plugins ([5].
^jEdit supports spell checking via an external plugin.
^JOE supports spell checking via the ispell or aspell external plugins.
^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.
^LE can pipe text through the GNU recode(1) utility
^Metapad spell checking by calling external program Aspell.
^ abmined supports multiple lines in search and replacement expressions. Cite error: The named reference "minedEncoding" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
^mined supports new-line conversion via a command-line option. Files with mixed newline types can be edited transparently; different kinds of new-line have different visual indications.
^Notepad++ supports spell checking via the aspell plugin. Spell checking can only be done on-demand, as opposed to instantly by underlining misspelled words.
^ abcdScintilla-based editors such as SciTE, Programmer's Notepad, Notepad2 and Notepad++ do not support alternation (|) in regular expressions. Cite error: The named reference "Scintilla_regex" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
^SubEthaEdit supports advanced block editing, including multi-line typing and non-contiguous block selections.
^UltraEdit uses the Boost C++ regex library. While Boost supports backreferences past \9 with \g{10}, UltraEdit has not yet implemented this feature.
^VEDIT spell checking: Macro package for integrating Aspell can be downloaded here. There is also Scribe spelling checker which has been written entirely in Vedit macro language.
^Vim version 7 supports spell checking natively. Earlier versions require a script shown here.
^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.
^ abBBEdit and TextWrangler are technically capable of any size file, but limited practically by RAM and OS X limitation to files ≤ 384mb. Cf. BBEdit FAQ Entry 36.
^ConTEXT claims Large File Support but load time is proportional to file size and a 1GB file gave an Out of Memory error.
^ abAlthough NoteTab is not a native Unicode editor, you can open, edit, convert, and save such files reliably as long as all the text fits within a single ANSI code page supported by Windows.
