Text editing takes place in the text area. It behaves in a similar manner to many Windows and MacOS editors; the few unique features will be described in this section.
The text area will automatically scroll up or down if text editing is performed closer than three lines from the top or bottom of the text area. This feature is called electric scrolling and can be disabled in the Text Area pane of the Utilities>Global Options dialog box; see the section called "The Global Options Dialog Box".
To aid in locating the caret, the current line is drawn with a different background color. To make it clear which lines end with white space, end of line markers are drawn at the end of each line. Both these features can be disabled in the Text Area pane of the Utilities>Global Options dialog box.
The strip on the left of the text area is called a gutter. The gutter displays marker and register locations; it will also display line numbers if the View>Line Numbers (shortcut: Control-E Control-T) command is invoked.