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Comparison of text editors
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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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.
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).
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Overview
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Operating system support
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This section lists the operating systems that different editors can run on. Some editors run on additional operating systems that are not listed.
Cross-platform
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Natural language (localization)
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Document interface
Notes
- Multiple instances: multiple instances of the program can be opened simultaneously for editing multiple files. Applies both for single document interface (SDI) and multiple document interface (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).
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Basic features
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Programming features
Notes
- 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, e.g., ensuring a given indent style.
- 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.
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Extra features
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Large file support:
 |
= Larger than 4 GiB (LFS) | 2 GB |
= Larger than 1 GB, not limited by memory |
| memory | = Limited by available memory |  (64 KB) |
= 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.[99]
Search in files: Perform search (and possibly replace) in multiple files on disk, for example on a sub-directory and recursively all the directories below it. Similar to grep.
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Key bindings
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Support for custom key bindings.
Notes, bugs
- Vim: custom maps of Ctrl-1 .. Ctrl-9, Ctrl-0 cannot be set, nor is Control-Shift-<char> distinguished from Ctrl-<char>.[119][120]
- Notepad++: custom shortcuts of Shift-<char> cannot be set, they need an added modifier such as Ctrl or Alt. i.e. SCI_LINESCROLLUP cannot be bound to "Shift-I"as the "Add"button is greyed out.
- Emacs and Pico: pico uses most of Emacs's motion and deletion commands: ^F ^B ^P ^N ^D etc.
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Protocol support
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Support for editing files over a network or the Internet.
Unicode and other character encodings
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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.
Right-to-left and bidirectional text
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Support for Right-To-Left (RTL) texts is necessary for editing some languages like Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and Yiddish and the mixture of left to right (LTR) and RTL known as bi-directional (BiDi) support.
Depending on the algorithm used in the programs it 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 cannot edit it and user should change the text direction to RTL to be able to edit RTL texts correctly.)
Newline support
See also
Notes
- last update in OpenBSD repo[28]
- Requires Cygwin or the Windows Subsystem for Linux to run on Windows.
- GEdit, when installed from MacPorts, runs in X11 and, therefore, does not have a native look and feel. However, precompiled native macOS binaries for GEdit may be downloaded from the GEdit project page, or from the GEdit FTP download server.
- gedit, NEdit, and SciTE run in the X11 window environment, and therefore do not use the native Aqua look-and-feel when running on macOS.
- Stand alone NSIS installable package is available
- gedit supports single document window splitting via plug‑ins. Archived 2011-12-14 at the Wayback Machine.
- gedit supports multiple document window splitting via plug‑ins. Archived 2011-12-14 at the Wayback Machine.
- GNU Emacs 27.1 includes built-in support for tab bar (per-frame) and tab-line (per-window). Earlier versions of 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 Archived 2008-01-17 at the Wayback Machine package.
- Vim version 7 supports a tabbed document interface. Earlier versions can emulate tabs through scripts, for example.[56]
- ConTEXT does not support regular expression backreferences in its search and replace function. Archived 2007-12-18 at archive.today
- ConTEXT only supports converting text to UTF-16. Also, it can only use one type of new-line format if converting to UTF-16.
- Geany supports spell checking via a plug‑in
- gedit supports Regex-based find & replace via plug‑ins ( Archived 2011-12-14 at the Wayback Machine).
- Vim version 7 supports spell checking natively. Earlier versions require a script.[67]
- Alpha Macro support via AppleScript, Tcl or text factories.
- BBEdit Macro support via AppleScript, Perl, Python, Lasso, shell scripts or text factories.
- Cssed Macro support via Python.
- jEdit: Limited by Java heap size.[84]
- Kate: Line length is limited by default. The limit can be removed, but long lines may cause poor performance.[87]
- LE text editor can view and edit large files or their parts in mmap-shared mode
- Emacs: 64-bit compilation on 64-bit OS can handle 2 GB files, otherwise the limit is 512 MiB.
- It is possible to customize all Gedit shortcuts because it is Gtk based.
- The JED base release comes with a basic CUA emulation, but it doesn't bother to bind lots of useful editor features. Also, like some other editors, 1 side of a region must be at the cursor. The main extension collections jedmodes/jed-extra and the "Red Project" have improved versions, tackling the former problem in particular.
- Vim With a script[113]
- JEDs Windows version comes with a pair of scripts that can convert UTF-16 text files (actually anything iconv can convert) to and from JED's internal UTF-8. The Red Project releases include an enhanced version of these scripts.
- TextPad can load and save UTF-8 and UTF-16 text files, but cannot use or even preserve characters outside of the system encoding.[128]
- GNU Emacs
(1) According to a comment in the source file where the bidi support is implemented (http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/src/bidi.c accessed August 15, 2017), GNU Emacs doesn't fully conform to the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (Unicode Annex #9, a.k.a. UAX #9) in the way it wraps the lines of a bidi paragraph: "we are violating paragraph 3.4 of UAX#9. which mandates that line breaking shall be done before reordering each screen line separately."
(2) According to the online GNU Emacs manual (section 22.19 Bidirectional Editing, accessed August 15, 2017), for the purpose of changing paragraph direction, "Paragraph boundaries are empty lines, i.e., lines consisting entirely of whitespace character". This contrasts with the otherwise ubiquitous convention of regarding the newline marker (LF on Unix derivatives, including macOS, and CR+LF on Windows) as the paragraph separator in plain text documents. However starting with version 26.0.50, the bidi paragraph separator can be customized. - Notepadpp: Scintilla (Notepad++'s Engine) does not really support bidirectional editing ... Some bidirectional text support added in 4.1.0. https://sourceforge.net/p/scintilla/bugs/757/#01c9
References
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