In a text display system facilitating the editing of text, smooth and flicker free updates to text displayed using proportionally spaced fonts are effected by interleaving the characters of an original and an updated text according to their associated cumulative character widths by sequentially storing each lesser cumulative character width and each character in buffers thereby establishing the order of display of the interleaved characters according to each original and updated cumulative character widths. The interleaved characters are then displayed according to the order of storage thereby incrementally displaying and deleting characters of the updated and original texts respectively such that an original character is deleted and replaced by an appropriate number of updated text characters resulting in a smooth text update.