A way of using a computer display such that the basic unit is the character cell—the space taken up by a single character. The only images that can be displayed are those that can be built from character-sized blocks; surprisingly complex images can however be built in text mode. A display device can be operated in a number of different text modes. The coarsest is probably the 40 characters by 24 lines used in some teletext systems, while some text modes have 132 characters per line. Each character has attributes such as colour, boldface type, blink, underline, or reverse video. Compare graphics mode.