Editing

The text surface is a RichTextFX CodeArea with line numbers, a fold gutter, a minimap, and a current-line highlight. Most of the editing help is automatic; the rest is a command away. See the full list on the Commands page.

Multiple cursors

Edit many places at once, VS Code style.

• Add a caret at the next occurrence of the selection, or above / below the current line, from the palette (edit.addCaret…).
• Select all occurrences (edit.selectAllOccurrences, Ctrl+Shift+L in the VS Code and Sublime keymaps) turns every occurrence of the selection, or of the word under the caret, into a cursor at once. Matching is literal and case-sensitive.
• From the Find bar, Alt+Enter (find.selectAllMatches) does the same for every match of the current query and closes the bar, so the query’s case, regex and whole-word toggles decide what gets a cursor.
• Alt-drag to make a column or box selection.
• Type, and the edit fans out to every caret. Esc collapses back to one.

Movement chords fan out too: C-f, C-b, C-n, C-p, C-a, C-e, M-f and M-b move every caret, like the arrow keys. Document, paragraph, sentence and page motions stay on the primary caret. Multiple cursors can be turned off in Settings, and they’re disabled in Simple UI mode.

Auto-indent

Enter does the right thing per language: it keeps the current line’s indent, adds a level after a block opener (braces, a trailing : in Python or YAML, do / then in shell, an open tag in XML or HTML), and splits a matching pair into an indented stanza with the closer dropped below. Typing a closer such as ), ], }, or a keyword like end / fi / done re-aligns the line to its opener.

Smart backspace removes a whole indent level in one press. On a blank, auto-indented line, a single Backspace jumps back to the end of the previous line. The indent unit (tabs or spaces) is inferred from the file.

Brackets and quotes

Typing (, [, {, ", ', or ` inserts the matching closer and keeps the caret between them. Type the closer when it’s already next to the caret and Editora types over it. Type an opener with a selection and it wraps the selection. Backspace inside an empty pair deletes both halves. Quotes aren’t auto-paired next to a word character, so the apostrophe in don't is left alone. Whenever the caret sits next to a bracket, it and its match are highlighted.

Go: Matching Bracket (nav.matchingBracket, Ctrl+Shift+\ in the VS Code keymap) jumps the caret to the bracket paired with the one beside it, and press it again to jump back. Edit: Select to Bracket selects everything between a pair, both brackets included. Matching is text-based, like the highlight, so a bracket inside a string or comment can pair with the wrong one.

Expand and shrink selection

Edit: Expand Selection grows the selection outward through syntactic levels: word, then the enclosing brackets or string, the line, the enclosing definition, the paragraph, the whole document. Edit: Shrink Selection retraces the exact same steps back. Shift+Alt+Right / Left in the VS Code, CUA and Sublime keymaps; Ctrl+W / Ctrl+Shift+W in the IntelliJ keymap (Option+Up / Down on macOS); palette-discoverable everywhere.

Where a language server is running, the ladder comes from the server’s own parse, so it respects strings and comments. Without one it falls back to text-based bracket and string matching, which is the always-available baseline.

Comments

M-; (Emacs comment-dwim) comments or uncomments using the language’s own syntax. A single line toggles a line comment; a multi-line selection toggles a block or region comment. It covers // and /* */, #, <!-- -->, --, and the rest, preserving indentation, and toggles back off when the text is already commented.

Small operations

Fill re-wraps a paragraph to the fill column (70 by default), repeating any comment or quote prefix on each wrapped line. Auto Fill mode (view.toggleAutoFill, off by default) does it as you type, breaking the line when it passes the fill column. It is prose-only, so it never wraps code, and each wrapped line keeps the paragraph’s indent.

Subword navigation moves and deletes by camelCase and snake_case parts: stepping through getUserName lands on get, User, Name, and acronyms split correctly (HTMLParser gives HTML and Parser). These have no default key, so bind them from Settings → Keymap if you want VS Code’s Ctrl+Alt+←/→.

Convert indentation rewrites the whole file’s leading whitespace between tabs and spaces. Alignment inside a line and string contents are left alone, and each direction reverses the other. Tabify / untabify work the other way round, converting whitespace runs anywhere in the selection (or the buffer) using the tab width. Align regexp pads a selection’s lines with spaces so a regular expression lines up in a column, which is how you align a block of = assignments; it only adds spaces, so re-running it is a no-op.

Copy with syntax highlighting puts a colored HTML flavor on the clipboard alongside the plain text, so code pasted into Slack, an email or a document keeps its highlighting. It is on by default for ordinary copies (Settings → Editor, or view.toggleCopyWithHighlighting) and uses a light GitHub-style palette, since pasted code usually lands on a light background. The explicit command ignores both the setting and the size cap. Plain text is always on the clipboard too, so pasting into a plain-text field is unchanged.

Abbreviations

A text-replacement dictionary: define a short abbreviation that expands to longer text. Expand the word before the caret on demand with C-x a e, or turn on Abbrev Mode (view.toggleAbbrevMode) to expand automatically when you type a space or punctuation. Define a new one with C-x a g, and manage the whole dictionary in Settings → Editor → Abbreviations (abbrev.manage).

Your typed case is carried onto the expansion, so btw gives by the way, Btw gives By the way, and BTW gives BY THE WAY; a lowercase abbreviation keeps any capitals inside its expansion.

The Emacs editing model

Beyond the keymap, Editora implements the concepts an Emacs user reaches for. See Emacs heritage for the full tour.

The kill ring holds the last 120 kills, and consecutive kills accumulate into one entry, so C-k C-k C-k then C-y restores all three lines. Kills are still written to the system clipboard, and text copied in another application wins over a stale ring entry, so C-y never surprises you. Edit: Yank from Kill Ring… picks an older entry directly. The ring is per window and lives for the session.

The mark ring is per buffer. C-SPC records the spot, C-x C-SPC pops back through older marks and around to where you started, and marks follow their text as you edit above them.

Narrowing is real, not a display filter: search, replace, macros and Select All see only the region, which is the point of it. An amber Narrowed badge in the status bar shows the state and widens on click. Saving always writes the whole file. Language-server support is suspended while narrowed, bookmarks, notes and breakpoints stop persisting until you widen, and undo history is dropped at the narrowing boundary (edits made while narrowed undo normally).

Rectangles act on the columns between point and mark, and each command is one undo step. They are character columns, so a tab counts as one, and the rectangle is remembered separately from the kill ring, as in Emacs.

Query-replace stops on each match and waits: y or Space replaces, n or Backspace skips, ! replaces all the rest, . replaces this one and stops, and q, Enter or Escape quits. Regexp mode expands $1 group references. In the Emacs keymap M-% runs query-replace rather than opening the find bar’s replace mode; the other keymaps are unchanged.

The C-u prefix argument gives the next command a count: C-u 5 C-n moves down five lines, C-u 3 C-k kills three, C-u 40 - inserts forty dashes. A bare C-u is 4 and repeating it multiplies by four, digits after it are that number, and C-g cancels a half-typed argument. C-u C-SPC is special-cased to pop-mark. Only the Emacs keymap binds C-u.

String manipulation

Convert the case style of the selection or the identifier at the caret (camelCase, PascalCase, snake_case, SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE, kebab-case, dot.case), with a Cycle Case Style that steps a token through the styles on repeated presses (edit.case.cycle) and a Swap Case (edit.case.swap). Whole-line transforms work on the selection or the whole file: sort ascending/descending (numeric-aware, case-insensitive), sort by length, reverse, shuffle, remove duplicate or empty lines, and trim trailing whitespace. Each is a palette command, or reach them all from one filterable picker, Edit: String Manipulation… (C-c x).

Hex viewer

Opening a binary file (an executable, archive, .class, .pdf, and so on) shows a read-only offset | hex | ASCII dump instead of garbage text. Binaries are detected by content, and large files show their first slice with a truncation note. View: Open as Hex (view.openAsHex) force-opens any file’s bytes as hex, and View: Open as Text switches back.

Read-only and View mode

Toggle a buffer read-only with C-x C-q so it can’t be edited by accident. Typing and edit commands are blocked, while highlighting, folding, search, and copy keep working. A file that isn’t writable on disk opens read-only automatically. A Word-style View Mode banner docks above the editor with an Enable Editing button when the file is writable, and while read-only, Space pages down and Backspace pages up like a pager.

Whitespace and the column ruler

View options in Settings toggle whitespace markers, a configurable column ruler, the minimap, and line numbers. These render as lightweight overlays drawn only for the visible lines, so they stay cheap on large files.