From BlenderWiki

[edit] The Text Editor

Blender has a Text Editor among its windows types, accessible via the Text Editor button () of the Window type menu, or via ⇧ ShiftF11.

The newly opened Text window is grey and empty, with a very simple toolbar (Text Toolbar). From left to right there are the standard Window type selection button and the window menus. Then, five toggle buttons: the full screen switch, one which shows/hides the line numbers for the text, one which enables/disables the word wrapping, one which enables/disables the syntax highlighting, and the last one which enables/disables the Python text plugins. At the end, a dropdown menu to select/add/open a text buffer, and two settings: the font of the editor, and the number of spaces in a tabulation.

The dropdown menu () allows you to select which Text buffer is to be displayed, as well as allowing you to create a new buffer or load a text file. If you choose to load a file the Text Editor temporarily becomes a File Browser window, with the usual functions. Once a text buffer is in the Text window, this behaves as a quite simple text editor.

Typing on the keyboard produces text in the text buffer. As usual, pressing dragging and releasing LMB selects text. The following keyboard commands apply:

• AltC or CtrlC - Copies the marked text into the text clipboard.
• AltX or CtrlX - Cuts out the marked text into the text clipboard.
• AltV or CtrlV - Pastes the text from the clipboard to the cursor in the Text window.

Blender’s cut/copy/paste clipboard is separate from the operating system (OS) clipboard. So normally you cannot cut/paste/copy out from/into Blender. To access your OS clipboard:

• Ctrl⇧ ShiftC - To copy text to the OS buffer (e.g. if you want to paste that text into another application).
• Ctrl⇧ ShiftX - To cut and copy text to the OS buffer.
• Ctrl⇧ ShiftV - To paste text from the OS buffer (e.g. you copied some text from your web browser or document editor).
• AltS - Saves the text as a text file, a File Browser window appears.
• AltO - Loads a text, a File Browser window appears.
• AltF - Pops up the Find & Replace toolbox.
• ⇧ ShiftAltF or RMB - Pops up the Text menu for the Text window.
• AltJ - Pops up a Num control where you can specify a line number the cursor will jump to.
• AltP - Executes the text as a Python script.
• AltU - Undo.
• AltR - Redo.
• CtrlR - Reopen (reloads) the current buffer (all non-saved modifications are lost).
• AltM - Converts the content of the text window into 3D text (max 100 chars).

To delete a text buffer just press the X button next to the buffer’s name, just as you do for materials, etc. The most notable keystroke is AltP which makes the content of the buffer being parsed by the internal Python interpreter built into Blender. The next page will present an example of Python scripting. Before going on it is worth noticing that Blender comes with only the bare Python interpreter built in, and with a few Blender-specific modules, those described in the API references.

The Text Editor has now also some dedicated Python scripts, which add some useful writing tools, like a class/function/variable browser, completion… You can access them through the Text → Text Plugins menu entry.

[edit] Other usages for the Text window

The text window is handy also when you want to share your .blend files with the community or with your friends. A Text window can be used to write in a README text explaining the contents of your blender file. Much more handy than having it on a separate application. Be sure to keep it visible when saving! If you are sharing the file with the community and you want to share it under some license you can write the license in a text window.