Jota: A Perfect Text Editor for Android

Productivity Sauce

Jota is probably the most feature-packed text editor for the Android platform, which makes it a perfect app for anyone writing for a living or just doing a lot of writing while on the move. For starters, Jota can handle large texts (up to one million characters according to its developer) and a wide range of encodings.

As a writer, you'll most certainly appreciate the word count feature, although you have to dig through Menu | File | Property to access it. Jota also sports an indispensable find and replace function which supports regular expressions for advanced search and replace operations. Other text editor essentials such as line numbering, undo/redo, auto-save are also present and accounted for. In addition to that, the app offers several creature comforts like the ability to save the cursor position and maintain a list of recent files. There is also a dedicated toolbar containing buttons for often-used functions like cut, paste, save, etc. This seemingly minor addition makes text editing much more efficient.

There are also a few handy features for the coders among us, including basic support for syntax highlighting and integration with the SL4A scripting environment.

The app also gives you a raft of options for customizing the text editor to your liking. Choose Menu | Preferences and you can tweak practically every aspect of the app: from font and view settings, to toolbar buttons and themes.

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