Visual editors or full screen editors are editing programs

Text editor

A text editor is a type of program used for editing plain text files.Text editors are often provided with operating systems or software development packages, and can be used to change configuration files and programming language source code....

 which display the text being edited on the screen as it is being edited, as opposed to line-oriented editors

Line editor

A line editor is a text editor computer program that manipulates text primarily by the display, modification, and movement of lines. Line editors precede screen-based text editors and originated in an era when a computer operator typically interacted with a teleprinter , with no video display, and...

 (such as ed, ex and edlin

Edlin

Edlin is a line editor included with MS-DOS and later Microsoft operating systems. It provides rudimentary capabilities for editing plain text files through a command-driven interface. Line numbers are specified using numerals, and operations are specified using single-character alphabetic...

).

The term is generally used in discussing character mode

Text mode

Text mode is a kind of computer display mode in which the content of the screen is internally represented in terms of characters rather than individual pixels. Typically, the screen consists of a uniform rectangular grid of character cells, each of which contains one of the characters of a...

, as opposed to GUI

Graphical user interface

In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...

 applications. All GUI editors are visual editors, but not all character mode editors are.

Some well known examples include:

• Vi
  Vi
  vi is a screen-oriented text editor originally created for the Unix operating system. The portable subset of the behavior of vi and programs based on it, and the ex editor language supported within these programs, is described by the Single Unix Specification and POSIX.The original code for vi...
  
  
• Emacs
  Emacs
  Emacs is a class of text editors, usually characterized by their extensibility. GNU Emacs has over 1,000 commands. It also allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work.Development began in the mid-1970s and continues actively...
  
  
• Pico
  Pico (text editor)
  Pico is a text editor for Unix and Unix-based computer systems. It is integrated with the Pine e-mail client, which was designed by the Office of Computing and Communications at the University of Washington....
  
  
• VEDIT
  VEDIT
  Vedit is a commercial text editor for Microsoft Windows and MS-DOS from Greenview Data, Inc.Vedit was one of the pioneers in visual editing. Today, it is a powerful and feature-rich general-purpose text editor....
  
  
• XEDIT
  XEDIT
  XEDIT is a visual editor for VM/CMS using block mode IBM 3270 terminals.It is much more line-oriented than modern PC and Unix editors. For example, it supports automatic line numbers, and many of the commands operate on blocks of lines. One of the features is a command line which allows the user to...