Best Text Editors
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What are 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 Text Editors currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
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1
Visual Studio Code
Microsoft
VSCode: Code editing. Redefined. Free. Built on open source. Runs everywhere. Go beyond syntax highlighting and autocomplete with IntelliSense, which provides smart completions based on variable types, function definitions, and imported modules. Debug code right from the editor. Launch or attach to your running apps and debug with break points, call stacks, and an interactive console. Working with Git and other SCM providers has never been easier. Review diffs, stage files, and make commits right from the editor. Push and pull from any hosted SCM service. Want even more features? Install extensions to add new languages, themes, debuggers, and to connect to additional services. Extensions run in separate processes, ensuring they won't slow down your editor. Learn more about extensions. With Microsoft Azure you can deploy and host your React, Angular, Vue, Node, Python (and more!) sites, store and query relational and document based data, and scale with serverless computing. -
2
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 -
3
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 -
4
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 -
5
BBEdit
Bare Bones Software, Inc.
The leading professional HTML and text editor for the Mac, with high-performance features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text.Starting Price: $49.99 -
6
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 -
7
Vim
Vim
Vim is a highly configurable text editor built for creating and changing any kind of text efficiently. It is included as "vi" with most UNIX systems and with Apple OS X. Vim is rock stable and is continuously being developed to become even better. Vim is persistent, multi-level, with an extensive plugin system, support for hundreds of programming languages and file formats, powerful search and replace feature, and it integrates with many tools. Vim online is a central place for the Vim community to store useful Vim tips and tools. Vim has a scripting language that allows for plugin like extensions to enable IDE behavior, syntax highlighting, colorization as well as other advanced features. These scripts can be uploaded and maintained using Vim online. Vim stands for Vi IMproved. It used to be Vi IMitation, but there are so many improvements that a name change was appropriate. Vim is a text editor which includes almost all the commands from the Unix program "Vi". -
8
TextMate
MacroMates
Powerful and customizable text editor with support for a huge list of programming languages and developed as open source. Making multiple changes at once, swapping pieces of code, and a lot more is made trivial with TextMate’s easy way to add multiple insertion points. Select what you want to search, what you want to search for, and TextMate will present the results in a way that makes it easy to jump between matches, extract matched text, or preview desired replacements. See what files have changes in the file browser view, what lines have changes in the editor view, bring up a diff of the current file’s changes, commit a subset, TextMate supports it all for all the major version control systems. One file mixing languages? Projects using different build systems? Third party code with different formatting preferences? TextMate can handle it all by associating detailed scope selectors with key shortcuts, settings, etc. -
9
Kate
KDE
Kate is packed with features that will make it easier for you to view and edit all your text files. Kate lets you to edit and view many files at the same time, both in tabs and split views, and comes with a wide variety of plugins, including an embedded terminal that lets you launch console commands directly from Kate, powerful search and replace plugins, and a preview plugin that can show you what your MD, HTML and even SVG will look like. Kate supports highlighting for over 300 languages making it easier to read code in almost all programming languages. Kate also understands how brackets works and will help you navigate inside complex code blocks hierarchies. On-the-fly spellchecking is also included and will help you check your text before publishing. Work on multiple files at the same time with split views. Use the project sidebar to navigate your project directory structures and use Kate's smart tabs to quickly access your recently opened documents. -
10
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 -
11
Desech Studio
Desech
Desech Studio is a free modern no code visual html/css editor which enables you to import your Figma, Sketch, AdobeXD design file to generate a clean html structure positioned with CSS grids. Then you can integrate it with React, Angular, Vue or Material Design. This is a product that I have worked on for quite some time and I'm excited to show it to the world. Desech Studio will always be free, with offline support and privacy conscious. Future plans are to integrate with Wordpress, and then implement features that will allow you to not need design software, and just design your application directly in Desech Studio.Starting Price: €9.99 per month -
12
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 -
13
Pinegrow
Pinegrow
Pinegrow is a Mac, Windows and Linux web editor that lets you build responsive websites faster with live multi-page editing, CSS & SASS styling, CSS Grid editor and support for Bootstrap, Tailwind CSS, Foundation and WordPress. Pinegrow is a desktop website builder that opens and saves standard HTML and CSS files. That means you won’t be locked into a proprietary file format. Just open and edit your existing projects. Use Pinegrow alongside other web development tools. Build websites offline, without internet connection. Create as many websites as you want. Quickly build the layout of your webpage with powerful visual tools for adding, editing, moving, cloning and deleting HTML elements. Insert multiple elements with repeater and modify the layout of all selected elements with one move. Inspect active CSS rules, use rich visual controls, CSS Grid editor, Dev tools-like editor or code - all working together as one. Edit SASS and LESS, live, without any external tools.Starting Price: $6 per month -
14
LightPaper
LightPaper
Great features bundled in a simple app to help you take notes and write documents. LightPaper lets you write your documents/articles/blogs using powerful features such as markdown, folder navigator, real and live preview, shadow notes, multi-tabs, custom styles, distraction free mode, syntax highlighting, math rendering, full GFM support including GitHub tasks, Jekyll rendering, and more. Whether you are a professional writer, a blogger, a developer, a scholar, or a student, LightPaper has you covered for all your writing and note taking needs. Use LightPaper's powerful folder navigator to open multiple folders and browse through all your documents. You can not only open a document quickly by double clicking it but can also create a new document or a folder, delete files or folders or rename them. Quick Open feature allows you to quickly search through all your files. Favorite a file or folder to have it accessible any time you need it.Starting Price: $14.99 one-time payment -
15
Textastic
Textastic
Textastic for Mac is the perfect desktop companion to the popular iOS code editor. With support for more than 80 source code and markup languages, Textastic brings the powerful syntax coloring engine of the iOS source code editor to the Mac. You can use your own TextMate, and Sublime Text, compatible syntax definitions. Textastic for Mac is based on the code editor that powers the iOS app. It uses native macOS APIs like Core Text for maximum speed. Code completion, file navigation with the symbol list and support for modern Mac features like Auto Save and Versions make your life easier. With iCloud Drive, you can sync your files across your macOS and iOS devices with ease. The app packs in support for 80 source code and markup languages, iCloud auto-save and macOS Versions. Built with the ability to import syntax definitions, themes and templates from TextMate.Starting Price: $7.99 one-time payment -
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
Pulsar
Pulsar-Edit
A community-led hyper-hackable text editor. Pulsar works across operating systems. Use it on OS X, Windows, or Linux. Search and install new packages or create your own right from Pulsar. Pulsar 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. Split your Pulsar interface into multiple panes to compare and edit code across files. Find, preview, and replace text as you type in a file or across all your projects.Starting Price: Free -
18
Typora
Typora
Typora gives you a seamless experience as both a reader and a writer. It removes the preview window, mode switcher, syntax symbols of markdown source code, and all other unnecessary distractions. Instead, it provides a real live preview feature to help you concentrate on the content itself. Typora allows you to manage your files easily, providing both file tree panel and articles (file list) side panel, allows you to manage your files easily. Organize your files your way, including putting in sync services, like Dropbox or iCloud. Automatically see the Outline structure of your documents in outline panel, which allows you to quickly go through the document and jump to any section with one click. Export to PDF with bookmarks. Go further and export or import. More formats, including docx, OpenOffice, LaTeX, MediaWiki, Epub, etc, can be exported or imported. See how large your document is in words, characters, lines, or reading minutes. -
19
Quiver
Quiver
Quiver is a notebook built for programmers. It lets you easily mix text, code, Markdown and LaTeX within one note, edit code with an awesome code editor, live preview Markdown and LaTeX, and find any note instantly via the full-text search. A note in Quiver is comprised of cells, snippets of text, code, Markdown, LaTeX (via MathJax) or diagrams (sequence diagram, flowchart). You can freely mix different cell types within one note. You can set different languages for different code cells, too. The programmer's notebook should make code editing effortless. Quiver packs the awesome ACE code editor in code cells, with syntax highlighting support for more than 120 languages, over 20 themes, automatic indent and outdent, and much more. Quiver lets you write in Markdown with inline formatting and custom CSS options. A live preview window renders Markdown as you type. Quiver uses MathJax to typeset mathematical equations written in LaTeX. -
20
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. -
21
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. -
22
Xeditor
Fabasoft Xpublisher
Xeditor is a professional online XML editor for XML authoring based on state-of-the-art web standards. By enabling authors to work together on structured content from any location at any time, Xeditor helps companies put efficient workflows in place. What’s more, the web-based architecture means there’s no need for time-consuming local installations. Xeditor, the professional online XML authoring tool, gives users the tools they need to create and edit structured documents intuitively in XML format. With the help of XML, content can be created in a way that is media-independent, semantically marked up, automatically processed, and published with a high degree of efficiency. XML is the data format of the future. Xeditor offers its users both an intuitive visual and a technical writing experience. Authors of subject-specific content benefit from the intuitive user interface of the visual XML editor, including WYSIWYG functionality. -
23
Nova
Panic
If we're being honest, Mac apps are a bit of a lost art. There are great reasons to make cross-platform apps — to start, they're cross-platform — but it's just not who we are. Founded as a Mac software company in 1997, our joy at Panic comes from building things that feel truly, well, Mac-like. Long ago, we created Coda, an all-in-one Mac web editor that broke new ground. But when we started work on Nova, we looked at where the web was today, and where we needed to be. It was time for a fresh start. It all starts with our first-class text-editor. It's new, hyper-fast, and flexible, with all the features you want: smart autocomplete, multiple cursors, a Minimap, editor overscroll, tag pairs and brackets, and way, way more. For the curious, Nova has built-in support for CoffeeScript, CSS, Diff, ERB, Haml, HTML, INI, JavaScript, JSON, JSX, Less, Lua, Markdown, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Sass, SCSS, Smarty, SQL, TSX, TypeScript, XML, and YAML. -
24
Emacs
GNU
At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. Content-aware editing modes, including syntax coloring, for many file types. Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users. Full Unicode support for nearly all human scripts. Highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical interface. A wide range of functionality beyond text editing, including a project planner, mail and news reader, debugger interface, calendar, IRC client, and more. A packaging system for downloading and installing extensions. Built-in support for arbitrary-size integers. Text shaping with HarfBuzz. Native support for JSON parsing. Better support for Cairo drawing. Portable dumping used instead of unexec. Support for XDG conventions for init files. Additional early-init initialization file. Built-in support for tab bar and tab-line. Support for resizing and rotating of images without ImageMagick. -
25
CodeRunner
CodeRunner
A lightweight, multi-language programming text editor and IDE for macOS. CodeRunner was designed to support all of the most widely used programming languages and run them instantly. The app is configured to run code in 25 languages out-of-the-box, and additional languages can be configured to run by simply entering their terminal command. With over 200 syntax modes, lots of advanced editing features and thoughtful details, CodeRunner will quickly become your go-to editor for any and all kinds of text files. CodeRunner's code completion is the best you'll find in any IDE. Intelligent matching of typed text enables completions beyond single words. Quickly find the right completion among thousands with the extra-fuzzy search algorithm, helpful documentation snippets, and smart ranking of results. Don't clutter your code with print-statements for debugging. Instead, use CodeRunner's built-in debugging features to set breakpoints and step through your code.Starting Price: $19.99 one-time payment -
26
gedit
The GNOME Project
gedit is the text editor of the GNOME desktop environment. The first goal of gedit is to be easy to use, with a simple interface by default. More advanced features are available by enabling plugins. A flexible plugin system which can be used to dynamically add new advanced features. -
27
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 -
28
Bluefish
Bluefish
Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and web developers, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages. See features for an extensive overview, take a look at the screenshots, or download it right away. Bluefish is an open-source development project, released under the GNU GPL license. Bluefish is a multi-platform application that runs on most desktop operating systems including Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS-X, Windows, OpenBSD and Solaris. Bluefish 2.2.12 is a minor maintenance release with some minor new features. Most important is a fix for a crash in a simple search. Python 3 compatibility has been further improved. Encoding detection in python files has been improved. Triple-click now selects the line. On Mac OSX Bluefish deals better with the new permission features. Also using the correct language in the Bluefish user interface is fixed for certain languages on OSX.
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