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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    Sublime Text

    Sublime Text

    Sublime HQ

    A sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose. Use Goto Anything to open files with only a few keystrokes, and instantly jump to symbols, lines or words. Make ten changes at the same time, not one change ten times. Multiple selections allow you to interactively change many lines at once, rename variables with ease, and manipulate files faster than ever. The Command Palette holds infrequently used functionality, like sorting, changing the syntax and changing the indentation settings. With just a few keystrokes, you can search for what you want, without ever having to navigate through the menus or remember obscure key bindings. Sublime Text has a powerful, Python API that allows plugins to augment built-in functionality. Package Control can be installed via the command palette, providing simple access to thousands of packages built by the community.
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    Starting Price: $80 one-time fee
  • 2
    Atom

    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
  • 3
    NoteTab

    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
  • 4
    EmEditor

    EmEditor

    Emurasoft

    EmEditor is a fast, lightweight, yet extensible, easy-to-use text editor for Windows. Both native 64-bit and 32-bit builds are available, and moreover, the 64-bit includes separate builds for SSE2 (128-bit), AVX-2 (256-bit), and AVX-512 (512-bit) instruction sets.
    Starting Price: $39.99
  • 5
    Komodo IDE

    Komodo IDE

    ActiveState Software

    Code faster with the IDE for today’s web languages – Python, PHP, Perl, Golang, Ruby and more.
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    Code::Blocks

    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
  • 7
    Bluefish

    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.
  • 8
    TinyMCE

    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/mo
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