Online Text Editor

The Online Text Editor lets you write and edit plain text without installing anything. Type or paste into the editor at the top of this page, open a .txt file from your computer, and download your work as a file when you're done. Find and replace, case changes, line sorting, and an undo history are built in. It's free, and your text never leaves your browser.

Not every job needs a word processor. Cleaning up a list, fixing a settings file, or tidying text copied from a website is quicker in a plain text editor, where what you see is exactly what gets saved. This one works the same on a computer, a Chromebook, or a phone, so you can edit a txt file online wherever you are.

Open, edit, and download text files

Select Open or press Ctrl+O (⌘O on a Mac) to open a plain text file, or drop it onto the editor. It reads .txt, .md, .csv, .json, .html, source code, and other plain text files up to 5 MB, as UTF-8. Word documents and PDFs aren't plain text, so copy their text and paste it in instead.

When you're done, select Download or press Ctrl+S (⌘S). The text is saved as a UTF-8 file under the name in the File name box, so change untitled.txt to something like notes.md or list.csv first. New starts an empty document, and like every other change, it can be undone.

Find and replace, with or without regular expressions

Press Ctrl+F (⌘F) or select Find and replace to open the search bar. Every match is highlighted, the counter shows where you are, such as 3 of 12, and Enter and Shift+Enter jump to the next and previous match. Type a replacement, then select Replace for one match or Replace all for every one. In very long files with more than 100,000 matches, the counter shows the total as 100,000+.

Three switches change how matching works:

• Match case: Apple no longer matches apple.
• Match whole word: cat no longer matches inside category.
• Use regular expression: the search becomes a pattern. ^ and $ match the start and end of each line, and the replacement can use $1 or $<name> for groups and $& for the whole match.

For example, with regular expressions on, find ^ and replace it with - to put a dash at the start of every line, or find [ \t]+$ and replace it with nothing to delete spaces at the ends of lines.

Change case and clean up lines

Open Transform to change the text in one step. Each tool works on the selection, or on all the text when nothing is selected. Line tools always work on whole lines, so a selection that starts mid-line covers that whole line:

• Change case: UPPERCASE, lowercase, Title Case, or Sentence case.
• Remove extra spaces: shortens runs of spaces and tabs to one space and trims the start and end of each line.
• Remove empty lines: deletes blank lines, including lines that only contain spaces.
• Remove duplicate lines: keeps the first copy of each line and deletes the repeats.
• Sort lines: A to Z or Z to A, in natural order, so item 2 comes before item 10 and capitals don't change the order. Reverse line order flips the list.

They're handy for cleaning a mailing list, sorting names, removing duplicate keywords, or tidying text pasted from a PDF. For camelCase, snake_case, and other cases, use the case converter.

Undo every step

Typing, pasting, find and replace, every transform, and New all go into the undo history. Press Ctrl+Z (⌘Z) or select Undo to step back, and Ctrl+Y or Ctrl+Shift+Z (⌘⇧Z) to redo. A Replace all that went wrong is one Undo away, and pressing Undo again keeps walking back through your edits one step at a time.

A draft that waits for you

With Keep a draft in this browser turned on, your text and file name are saved on this device as you type, and the status shows Draft saved. Come back later and they're restored, with a short message to say so.

The draft is a backup, not a file, so download anything you want to keep. Turn the option off to delete the draft straight away, and keep it off on shared or public computers. Very long texts can be too large to keep as a draft; the status tells you when that happens.

Comfortable to write in, on any screen

The toolbar has Word wrap, a Monospace font for code and tables, smaller and larger text, Spell check, and Full screen, which hides everything but the editor until you press Esc. Tab inserts a tab or indents the selected lines, and Shift+Tab outdents them; press Esc, then Tab, to move focus out of the editor. The status bar shows the cursor's line and column, how much is selected, and live word and character counts.

On a phone or tablet, every action is on the toolbar, so you don't need shortcuts. On iPhone and iPad, downloaded files go to the Files app; on Android, to the Downloads folder.

Private by design

The editor runs entirely in your browser, so your text is never uploaded to a server, and opening a file only reads it on your device. Only the optional draft is stored, in this browser's local storage on your device, and clearing your browser's site data removes it as well. The privacy policy has the details.

More tools for plain text

Need many quick notes rather than one file? The online notepad keeps a list of notes that save on their own. To print or share a clean document, paste your text into the text to PDF converter, and to repeat a line many times, use the text repeater. Then go back to the editor and keep writing.