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text mode Last modified: Sunday, September 01, 1996

A video mode in which a display screen is divided into rows and columns of boxes. Each box can contain one character. Text mode is also called character mode. All video standards for the PC, including VGA, support a text mode that divides the screen into 25 rows and 80 columns. In addition to text mode, most video adapters support a graphics mode, in which the display screen is divided into an array of pixels. Whereas character-based programs run in text mode, all graphics-based programs run in graphics mode.