Best Free Text Editors
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Compare the Top Free Text Editors as of October 2025
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What are Free Text Editors?
Text editors are software applications that allow users to create, edit, and manipulate plain text files. They are essential for writing and editing code, documentation, notes, and other types of text-based content. Text editors typically offer basic features like syntax highlighting, search and replace, and line numbering for developers, as well as more advanced features like version control integration, autocomplete, and code folding. While simple text editors allow basic editing, more advanced versions are widely used for their versatility and customization options, especially in programming and content creation. Compare and read user reviews of the best Free Text Editors currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
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1
Visual Studio Code
Microsoft
Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is Microsoft’s open-source AI code editor designed to make coding faster, smarter, and more collaborative. It supports thousands of extensions and nearly every programming language, offering developers a lightweight yet powerful environment for writing, testing, and debugging code. With AI-powered features like GitHub Copilot, Next Edit Suggestions, and Agent Mode, VS Code helps you code with precision, automate complex tasks, and streamline development workflows. It integrates seamlessly with cloud services, remote repositories, and tools like Git, Docker, and Azure. The editor is fully customizable, allowing you to personalize your layout, color themes, and keyboard shortcuts. Whether coding locally or in the browser, VS Code delivers a complete development experience for individuals and teams alike.Starting Price: Free -
2
IntelliJ IDEA
JetBrains
IntelliJ IDEA is a professional-grade integrated development environment (IDE) primarily designed for Java and Kotlin development. It helps developers write code faster by automating routine tasks and providing smart coding assistance. The IDE supports the full software development lifecycle, from design and coding to testing and deployment. IntelliJ IDEA stays up to date with the latest language features, such as full support for Java 24 and Kotlin K2 mode. It offers a smooth and enjoyable workflow that helps developers stay focused and productive. The platform also emphasizes data privacy and security, complying with industry standards like SOC 2.Starting Price: $19.90 per user per month -
3
Apache NetBeans
Apache Software Foundation
Apache NetBeans is a versatile, open-source Integrated Development Environment (IDE) used for developing applications across a wide range of programming languages, including Java, JavaScript, PHP, HTML5, and C/C++. Known for its modular architecture, NetBeans provides robust tools and features that cater to the needs of developers working on desktop, mobile, and web applications. It includes intelligent code editing, debugging, and profiling capabilities, along with a built-in visual GUI builder for designing Java-based user interfaces. NetBeans also offers support for version control systems like Git, SVN, and Mercurial, facilitating seamless team collaboration. As an Apache Software Foundation project, NetBeans benefits from an active community that continuously improves and expands its functionality, making it a reliable and flexible choice for developers across various domains.Starting Price: Free -
4
Atom
GitHub
Atom is a hackable text editor for the 21st century, built on Electron, and based on everything we love about our favorite editors. We designed it to be deeply customizable, but still approachable using the default configuration. A text editor is at the core of a developer’s toolbox, but it doesn't usually work alone. Work with Git and GitHub directly from Atom with the GitHub package. Create new branches, stage and commit, push and pull, resolve merge conflicts, view pull requests and more—all from within your editor. The GitHub package is already bundled with Atom, so you're ready to go! Atom works across operating systems. Use it on OS X, Windows, or Linux. Search for and install new packages or create your own right from Atom. Atom helps you write code faster with a smart and flexible autocomplete. Easily browse and open a single file, a whole project, or multiple projects in one window.Starting Price: Free -
5
Obsidian
Obsidian
Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files. The human brain is non-linear: we jump from idea to idea, all the time. Your second brain should work the same. In Obsidian, making and following "connections" is frictionless. Tend to your notes like a gardener; at the end of the day, sit back and marvel at your own knowledge graph. Note-taking is incredibly personal. Tried every app, but there's always something not quite right? You deserve better. Obsidian is built to be extensible. With 22 core plugins and 149 community plugins, set up your own toolkit and get running in minutes. You'll even be able to install third party plugins or build your own once Obsidian reaches v1.0. Sky's the limit. In our age when cloud services can shut down, get bought, or change privacy policy any day, the last thing you want is proprietary formats and data lock-in. With Obsidian, your data sits in a local folder.Starting Price: $25 one-time payment -
6
SeaMonkey
SeaMonkey
SeaMonkey is an all-in-one Internet application suite that combines a web browser, email and newsgroup client, feed reader, IRC chat, and HTML editor into one powerful platform. Developed by the SeaMonkey community, it continues the legacy of the classic Netscape and Mozilla suites with a modern, open-source foundation. Built using the Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird codebase, SeaMonkey offers a familiar and reliable browsing and communication experience. Users benefit from advanced features like tabbed browsing, smart location bar, adaptive junk filtering, and multi-account support. Its integrated design caters to web developers, advanced users, and corporate professionals who value functionality and control. With ongoing updates and strong community backing, SeaMonkey delivers everything you need for the Internet—right in one place.Starting Price: Free -
7
CryptPad
CryptPad
CryptPad is built to enable collaboration. It synchronizes changes to documents in real time. Because all data is encrypted, the service and its administrators have no way of seeing the content being edited and stored. Store and manage documents with CryptDrive. Create folders, shared folders, and tags to organize documents. Upload and share files (PDFs, photos, video, audio, etc.). Team drives are shared between users and allow for collaborative organization and fine-grained access controls. CryptPad does not profit from user data. This is part of a vision for online services that respect privacy. Unlike the big platforms that pretend to be "free" while making profits from personal information, CryptPad aims to build a sustainable model funded willingly by users. We offer CryptPad's functionality for free because we believe everyone deserves personal privacy, not just people with disposable income.Starting Price: €5 per month -
8
NoteTab
Fookes Software
For some NoteTab is simply the best Notepad replacement out there. For webmasters it’s the fastest HTML editor. For others it’s the most versatile text editor. For power users it’s a unique text-processing work horse. What will it be for you? In a moment, we’re going to reveal to you the 10 most significant features that have turned NoteTab into one of the most awarded text editors ever. But first an interesting fact in case you’ve never heard of NoteTab before. The tab bar. It’s a feature users have always loved about NoteTab. Open as many files as you like, each one with its own tab. Rearrange tabs any way you like in the convenient tab bar.Starting Price: $39.95 one-time payment -
9
Komodo IDE
ActiveState Software
Code faster with the IDE for today’s web languages – Python, PHP, Perl, Golang, Ruby and more. -
10
Dev-C++
Embarcadero
Embarcadero Dev-C++ is a new and improved fork (sponsored by Embarcadero) of Bloodshed Dev-C++ and Orwell Dev-C++. It is a full-featured Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and code editor for the C/C++ programming language. It uses Mingw port of GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) as its compiler. Embarcadero Dev-C++ can also be used in combination with Cygwin or any other GCC based compiler. Embarcadero Dev-C++ is built using the latest version of Embarcadero Delphi. Embarcadero Dev-C++ has a low memory footprint because it is a native Windows application and does not use Electron. Optimized for parallel compilation on modern multi-core machines. -
11
BlueGriffon
Disruptive Innovations
The next-gen Web and EPUB Editor based on the rendering engine of Firefox. BlueGriffon® has a long list of famous ancestors and proudly inherits from all of them: Netscape®, Mozilla® Composer and Nvu. It is powered by Gecko, the same rendering engine you can find at the heart of Firefox®, and is filled with tons of powerful features. BlueGriffon® is used by millions of users around the world, including Universities, Governments and even the European Parliament. It is officially recommended by the French Government as the Web Authoring Tool for the French Administration in its effort to rely on and promote Free Software. BlueGriffon® is used by millions of users around the world, including Universities, Governments and even the European Parliament. It is officially recommended by the French Government as the Web Authoring Tool for the French Administration in its effort to rely on and promote Free Software.Starting Price: $87.75 one-time payment -
12
Zed
Zed Industries
Zed is a next-generation code editor designed for high-performance collaboration with humans and AI. Written from scratch in Rust to efficiently leverage multiple CPU cores and your GPU. Integrate upcoming LLMs into your workflow to generate, transform, and analyze code. Chat with teammates, write notes together, and share your screen and project. Multibuffers compose excerpts from across the codebase in one editable surface. Evaluate code inline via Jupyter runtimes and collaboratively edit notebooks. Support for many languages via Tree-sitter, WebAssembly, and the Language Server Protocol. Fast native terminal tightly integrates with Zed's language-aware task runner and AI capabilities. First-class modal editing via Vim bindings, including features like text objects and marks. Zed is built by a global community of thousands of developers. Boost your Zed experience by choosing from hundreds of extensions that broaden language support, offer different themes, and more.Starting Price: Free -
13
Lapce
Lapdev
Lapce is a cutting-edge, open-source code editor focused on delivering a fast and responsive experience, particularly for developers working with large projects or complex codebases. Written in Rust, Lapce leverages the performance advantages of native development to provide a smooth editing experience with minimal lag. It features a clean, modern interface and advanced functionality such as multi-caret editing, split views, and integrated terminal support. With built-in support for the Language Server Protocol (LSP), Lapce offers precise autocompletion, syntax highlighting, and code navigation across various programming languages, enhancing productivity. Its extensibility, support for plugins, and focus on performance make Lapce ideal for developers looking for a lightweight yet powerful editor that balances simplicity with capability, appealing to both beginners and seasoned professionals.Starting Price: Free -
14
Predator CNC Editor
Predator Software
The Predator CNC Editor is the most popular CNC code editor available on the market. It includes hundreds of features to improve the day to day productivity of CNC machine tools, operators and CNC programmers, yet it is extremely easy to use. The Predator CNC Editor is the ideal choice for the small job shop or the largest manufacturer.Starting Price: $250 -
15
Boost Note
Boost Note
Boost Note is a powerful, lightspeed collaborative workspace for developer teams. Built to empower developers productivity with the most solid note taking experience for developers. Not just a GitHub flavored markdown. Put diagrams with Charts.js, Mermaid, and PlantUML in documents to maximize visibility. Choose from keymaps like Vim, over 150 themes, and more to create your own Markdown editor. Manage your documents programmatically. Grab an authentication token and access Boost Note's APIs via simple HTTP requests. Automate your documentation work with over 2,000 external tool integrations via Zapier. Collaborate with your colleagues and share information your way. Have all your teams in one shared workspace. Write documents as a team with Boost Note's realtime editing. Check revision history of a doc. You can easily roll back to one of the previous versions in one click. Keep your important data safe through granula access control based on workspace.Starting Price: $3 per member per month -
16
Lexical
Lexical
Lexical is comprised of editor instances that each attach to a single content editable element. A set of editor states represent the current and pending states of the editor at any given time. Lexical is designed for everyone. It follows best practices established in WCAG and is compatible with screen readers and other assistive technologies. Lexical is minimal. It doesn't directly concern itself with UI components, toolbars or rich-text features and markdown. The logic for these features can be included via a plugin interface. It's super easy to get started with Lexical in any environment. Lexical is framework agnostic, but provides a set of bindings for React to help you get off the ground even quicker. After the initial setup, delightfully ergonomic APIs make building custom functionality straightforward and downright fun!Starting Price: Free -
17
AIEditor
AIEditor
Simple, easy to use, open source license friendly, no limit count of users and apps, rich documentation. As an AI-powered rich text editor, AIEditor helps you build knowledge products quickly. Be able to recognize and correctly render the basic syntax of Markdown, and see results in real time. You can have AI check for spelling and grammar errors, you can expand 10 words to 200 words or condense 200 words into 50 words, you can let the AI summarize the core content, and more. All this is done without leaving the editor. Allows multiple users to work on the same document at the same time. You can see other people's input and changes in real-time. It is suitable for software development, marketing, legal document review, project management, teaching, news reporting, medical research, and other scenarios. Allow reviewers to add comments or suggestions to specific sections of the document, as well as flag questions, errors, or areas for improvement in the document for subsequent revision.Starting Price: Free -
18
EditPad Lite
EditPad
EditPad Lite is a compact general-purpose text editor. Use EditPad Lite to easily edit any kind of plain text file. EditPad Lite has all the essential features to make text editing a breeze. Large file and long line support. Full Unicode support, including complex scripts and right-to-left scripts. Direct editing of text files using Windows, Unix, and Mac text encodings (code pages) and line breaks. Tabbed interface for working with many files. Unlimited undo and redo for all open files, even after saving. Automatic backup and working copies prevent data loss. Powerful search-and-replace with literal search terms and regular expressions that can span multiple lines. EditPad Lite is free for personal use. Business and government users can purchase a license. If you use EditPad Lite at home or at school for purposes that don’t generate money, you can download the free version of EditPad Lite without any kind of payment or registration.Starting Price: Free -
19
Code::Blocks
Code::Blocks
Code::Blocks is a free, open-source, cross-platform Integrated Development Environment (IDE) primarily designed for C, C++, and Fortran development. Known for its lightweight design and modular structure, Code::Blocks offers a highly customizable interface with support for multiple compilers, including GCC, Clang, and Microsoft Visual C++. It features an intuitive, user-friendly interface with essential tools like syntax highlighting, code folding, auto-completion, and a robust debugging environment with breakpoints, variable inspection, and call stack tracing. Code::Blocks is highly extensible through plugins, enabling developers to add features like version control, scripting support, and custom build tools. Its lightweight nature, flexibility, and cross-platform compatibility make it a popular choice for students, educators, and developers working on small to medium-sized C/C++ projects.Starting Price: Free -
20
VSCodium
VSCodium
Microsoft’s vscode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking. The VSCodium project exists so that you don’t have to download+build from source. This project includes special build scripts that clone Microsoft’s vscode repo, run the build commands, and upload the resulting binaries for you to GitHub releases. These binaries are licensed under the MIT license. Telemetry is disabled. Note for Mac OS X Mojave users, if you see “App can’t be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software” when opening VSCodium the first time, you can right-click the application and choose Open. This should only be required the first time opening on Mojave. The most up-to-date information on migrating from Visual Studio Code and other quirks you might encounter are documented. -
21
CKEditor 5
CKSource
CKEditor 5 is a modern WYSIWYG rich text editor that can easily accommodate the requirements of businesses and users in the age of digital transformation. It allows software creators and developers to build powerful writing solutions for applications of all sorts, within hours. Thanks to a fully customizable framework, ready-to-use builds, native integrations, extensive documentation, and reliable customer support, the editor can be fully tailored to your needs. To provide users with an all-around streamlined and collaborative writing experience, you can additionally include advanced features such as Track Changes and Comments, Revision History, and (if preferred) Real-time Collaboration! Easy Export to PDF and Word, responsive images, pagination, Markdown input and output support, and robust paste from Word and Google Docs are also popular choices. -
22
Easy Editor
Easy Editor
A rich text HTML/WYSIWYG editor. You can change the entire look and feel with a simple click. You can add buttons and events and use them to do anything. EasyEditor is completely free and open-source for both educational and commercial purposes. You can check all the examples on our site. You can read the documentation and follow the steps provided so you know everything you need. You can overwrite default button settings. -
23
JetBrains Fleet
JetBrains
Built from scratch, based on 20 years of experience developing IDEs. JetBrains Fleet uses the IntelliJ code-processing engine, with a distributed IDE architecture and a reimagined UI. We built Fleet to be a fast and lightweight text editor for when you need to quickly browse and edit your code. It starts up in an instant so you can begin working immediately, and it can easily transform into an IDE, with the IntelliJ code-processing engine running separately from the editor itself. Fleet inherits the things that developers love the most from IntelliJ-based IDEs – project and context aware code completion, navigation to definitions and usages, on-the-fly code quality checks, and quick-fixes. Fleet’s architecture is designed to support a range of configurations and workflows. You can simply run Fleet just on your machine, or move some of the processes elsewhere – for example by locating the code processing in the cloud. -
24
PimNote
Pimtel
PimNote is a simple text editor for faster document access. It also combines the useful and lacking features of all other text editors. Designed for knowledge management. One-click access to the recent file list helps you write a new idea to the related file quickly before forgetting it. The unlimited and searchable recent file list helps you easily reach an old file that was opened a long time ago. The one-click find history list and search help you type less. Designed for remote working. No freezing from a remote file monitoring/opening/writing when disconnected. Files are cached for offline use by just closing the application without closing the tabs. Auto reconnect the network drive while opening the file. Repeated file notifications are informed politely on the top bar instead of a pop-up dialog box that requires frequent actions and tends to be mispressed. -
25
TinyMCE
Tiny Technologies
TinyMCE gives you total control over rich text editing within any application. As a WYSIWYG component, it can be seamlessly integrated into your web app's existing tech stack – and can be fully customized via its 400+ APIs and 12+ framework integrations or used out-of-the-box as an enterprise-grade editor. TinyMCE paid plans include advanced features that are perfectly suited to enterprise-grade uses and even the most complex edge-cases. Three popular premium features: 1. AI Assistant: Generative AI = faster writing → Embed the power of AI inside your app with pre-written prompts 2. PowerPaste: 99.9% accurate copy-paste = less support tickets → Cleanly copy-paste from MSWord, GDocs, Excel, and other popular apps 3. Spell Checker Pro: Eliminate errors = consistent on-brand spelling → Check up to 13 languages (plus medical terms) and build custom dictionaries Available in the cloud and on-premise. Easily integrates with React, Angular, Vue, Bootstrap and others.Starting Price: $79/month
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