Simple Text Editor

Free or paid:

• Free

Accessibility and User Comments:

This is the most accessible text editor I found for editing plain text files on the file system. It shows the text file in a big TextEdit field, so it's normal text editing with TalkBack.

There is a top bar that shows the current file name, and an * (asterisk) if there are unsaved changes; next, you have a search feature, which isn't very accessible (more on that below). Next, you have an "Edit" menu that has undo and redo. Next, you have a file menu, which contains new, open, save, save as, share, print, settings and exit. On the text search feature -- it starts doing an incremental search from the cursor position. You hear it scrolling the view if it finds anything. At this point, I back out of the keyboard and the search bar, get the text view selected, and double tap and hold to get the cursor somewhere nearby the search result. I can then navigate by word/line to figure out where the text hit was.

While editing the search text field, there are "clear query" and "submit query" buttons. The "submit query" button does an "additional search", eventually saying "xxx not found"; this is to perform additional searches with the same query. This is the most efficient way I've found to help navigate large files. It's not great, but it's something. Granted, I'm a hipster who edits ".txt" files and copies them over SSH to a NAS; I don't know how many people have a need for editing plain text files on Android, but in case you're looking for a plain text editor that isn't confusing with TalkBack, this is the one.

Last Tested App version and Android version:

1.26.1, Android 14