The first essential thing for all developers to square away is their development environment. In this article, recent Alumnus Andy Tuttle compares some of the most popular text editors and IDEs to help you get set up and coding away.
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Brackets is a free, open-source, lightweight, powerful, and modern text editor that make easy to design in the web browser. Brackets was founded by Adobe and it helps to push web development editor to the next level. This web development editor is available for cross-platform download on Mac, Windows, and Linux. I am always looking for a new, better text editor for web development. I’m not a veteran at development, but I want to have a tool that is robust enough that as I become more familiar with it and more capable at development, I could kind of “grow into” its more advanced features. The best free and paid text editor programs for Mac whether you're a web developer, programmer, technical writer, or anything in between! Text editors are an entirely different story. Text editors are much more helpful if you're editing code, creating web pages, doing text transformation or other things for which a word processor is just overkill. As web developers we have a lot of options for integrated development environments (IDE). These code editors make our job much easier. For some people using a simple text editor like Notepad or Notepad++ as the answer.
Text editors
Traditionally, the basic notepad and simple text editors could suffice for a coding platform, but in order to provide most of the modern conveniences like syntax linting, error correction, project folder organization, and build tools, current text editors have become much more robust. Some of the latest and most popular text editors include:
Sublime Text
The standard text editor for most web developers, currently on version 3. It has a huge community of users, plenty of packages to extend functionality, and it supports a wide variety of languages and standards. Only issue? The paid version is $99 or so, and though you may use the free version indefinitely, an annoying pop-up window will hit you every so often.
Atom.io
The newer, cooler, text editor that is 100% free. Originally developed by the GitHub team, and widely hailed as the most customizable modern text editor, Atom is built with Electron, a tool for making desktop apps in web friendly HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This makes it a snap to add new packages and modules to customize every aspect of the editor.
TextWrangler and BBEdit (Mac)
Another simple text editor with minimal features focused on bringing an easy development experience to development projects with little to no waste. TextWrangler - produced by Bare Bones Software is being phased out in favor of their other text editor BBEdit which has a similar aesthetic and use case.
IDEs
For those times when a lightweight text editor just won’t cut it, Integrated development environments (IDEs) provide advanced refactoring tools, error handling, emulated build environments, and debugging tools. These programs are full-featured, but definitely heavily resource intensive.
Most IDEs are specifically suited for advanced users or specific languages. Some of the most well-known are:
Visual Studio
The Microsoft behemoth is a full suite of development tools for most languages. Most C based languages (and especially C#) are fully supported and build tools are specialized for .Net and Microsoft technologies.
Xcode
The Apple giant that runs on every Mac. It specializes on objective-C and Swift development tools. It even offers full emulated iOS build environments.
Eclipse
The open source, cloud-based IDE ecosystem for multiple languages and uses. Eclipse was originally a Java development platform but has since expanded to many uses and other platforms.
IntelliJ IDEA
The standard for Java and J2EE development. This is a very full featured IDE developed specifically for the Java developer working in the JVM environment. It strongly integrates all necessary tools for enterprise level apps. Also, the official Android SDK IDE is build on IntelliJ.
Other more specialized software for development may take on many forms, and can include a vast array of options. A few final mentions are:
Visual Studio Code
This is Microsoft’s attempt at creating an extensible, lightweight, open-source platform for many different developers to use. So far, the reception in the community has been very positive and there are already many custom modules to add more functionality to each piece of the project. Think of it as a text editor that can be beefed up to near IDE levels of functionality.
Currently, there is ample support for most modern languages and integrations with some of the most popular tools in the industry.
Vim vs. emacs
These two editors are some of the most talked about and fought over editors in the history of text editors. They really are their own ecosystems and have very zealous fan bases.
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Vim is based on the original Unix vi terminal editor and is frequently used to edit settings and small changes on the fly. Emacs is the free GNU open-source editor that champions customizability and extensibility. While each has its pros and cons, the answer for any beginner is to stick to something that you find simple to use.
The text editors and IDEs mentioned above are just a small sampling of the most prevalent and popular editing environments available to developers today. Many more have specific uses and are simply custom designs of similar concepts. As a developer, find a few that work for your needs and stick to them -- learn the details and extend the functionality and UI to fit your workflow.
What's important is that you are able to easily navigate the whatever editor you use to get to what really matters: your projects.
Happy coding!
This blog post was brought to you by Andy Tuttle, who graduated March 24th, 2017, and is currently a Software Engineer @ Itential in Atlanta.
You can make writing code as complicated as you want, but at the end of the day, all you really need is your favorite, trusty text editor. You can use a simple one like Microsoft’s Notepad, but oftentimes it’s helpful to have a text editor that has syntax highlighting/coloring, support for multiple languages, a robust find and replace feature, and other features and options that make writing code just a tad bit easier.
If you’re in search of a good, free text editor – you’ve come to the right place. Below you’ll find 12 first-class free text editors that are designed with coders’ needs in mind. Whether you use a Windows, Mac, or Linux machine – you’ll find a few options here that will satisfy your code-authoring needs.
NOTEPAD++
(Windows)
NOTEPAD++ is the premier replacement for Microsoft’s Notepad. It has an auto-completion feature (for most supported languages) that guesses what you’re trying to write, a tabbed interface which is great for working with multiple files without cluttering your task bar, a powerful RegEx find-and-replace feature, code folding, support for a large array of languages (even Assembler!) and much more. These are just some of the features that make NOTEPAD++ my personal default text editor.
Bluefish Editor
(Mac, Linux)
Bluefish Editor is a robust, open source text editor geared towards programmers and web designers. It’s known as being a fast, lightweight text editor that can open 500+ documents with ease. It has a built-in function reference browser (for PHP, Python, CSS, and HTML) so you can quickly learn about with particular syntaxes. Check out the Screenshots section to find movies/screencasts (such as learning about working with remote files) and screen shots of Bluefish Editor.
TextWrangler
(Mac)
TextWrangler is a multi-purpose text editor for the Mac OS. It is a programmer-friendly text editor and Unix/Server Admin text editor. It has a useful “plugin” system allowing developers a way for extending TextWrangler’s built-in features. It also has a function browser so that you can quickly find and jump to the function you’re looking for (very helpful for those really long files).
Smultron
(Mac)
Smultron is an easy-to-use text editor. Its simple interface makes it perfect for the minimalist coder. It has the basic features you’d expect from a text editor such as syntax highlighting/coloring but also has cool, helpful features such as the ability to split the viewing pane in two so that you can view files side-by-side, a code snipplet library to allow you to store your often-used code blocks, and a full-screen mode that’s intended to make you focus on the task at hand.
Caditor
(Windows)
Caditor is an open source portable text editor written in the .NET framework (C#) that puts speed and performance at the forefront of its design. It has a convenient search box built into the tool bar of the text editor’s interface so that you don’t have to open another dialog box to perform a search. It has other handy features common to developer-oriented text editors such as line numbering, a compiler feature to allow you to hook it up with your compiler, and FTP feature.
gedit
(Linux)
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gedit is the official text editor of the GNOME desktop. Unlike Microsoft’s built-in text editor (Notepad), gedit is a more feature-packed text editor geared towards usage for programming and mark-up. With its syntax highlighting, tabbed interface for editing multiple files, and spell-checking feature – gedit is an excellent, free text editor for coders.
GNU Emacs
(Windows, Mac, Linux)
GNU Emacs (more commonly referred to simply as Emacs) is a cross-platform, extendable text editor geared towards programmers. One of its defining features is Emacs’s ability to be extended – offering you the ability to use it as your project planner and debugger, among other things. It has a file-comparison feature (M-x ediff) that highlights differences between two files (useful for figuring out changes in a file made by coders who don’t document/comment their revisions).
Crimson Editor
(Windows)
Crimson Editor is a lightweight text editor for Windows that supports many languages. It has a “Macros” features which lets you record a sequence of tasks so that you can reuse the sequence with a click of a button. It has a built-in FTP feature, allowing you to upload/download files from your FTP server. Crimson Editor is a solid option for Windows users.
![Best Text Editor For Web Development Mac Best Text Editor For Web Development Mac](/uploads/1/2/6/0/126076421/170567635.jpeg)
ConTEXT
(Windows)
ConTEXT is another excellent, light-weight, freeware (meaning it’s free – but close-sourced) text editor for Windows. It has countless of handy features such as text sorting (helpful when you need to sort things in alphabetical order, for example), the ability to export configuration options so that you can share your configuration or import it into several machines, and a macro recorder for repeating a sequence of tasks. In 2007, ConTEXT development was turned over to David Hadley but continues to be freeware.
SciTE
(Windows, Linux)
SciTE, written on top of the open source Scintilla code-editing component, is a speedy text editor aimed for use in source code editing. It has a standalone .exe version which you can use for portable storage drives (i.e. USB flash drives) so that you can conveniently carry it around and use it on any computer without having to install it. SciTE is compatible with Windows and Linux operating systems and has been tested by the developer on Windows XP and on Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 7.10.
Komodo Edit
(Windows, Mac, Linux)
Komodo Edit is a freeware, cross-platform text editor created by ActiveState. It is a simple text editor based on the popular integrated development environment – Komodo IDE. It has a convenient and flexible Project Manager feature to help you organize and keep track of your project files.
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jEdit
(Windows, Mac, Linux)
jEdit is a text editor that specifically caters to programmers. It’s written in Java and runs on any operating system that supports You can download a ton of plugins (check out the Plugins Central on jEdit’s website) to extend its built-in features. jEdit was designed to combine the best features of Windows, Mac, and Unix text editors.
Additional Resources
- Comparison of text editors (Wikipedia)
- Hive Five: Best Text Editors (Lifehacker)
What do you think?
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Find one that you like the best and stick to it, as everything down to the text can influence your clients’ web reputation whether they are a golf course or a restaurant. There’s a ton of text editors out there so be sure to share your experiences and opinions on the text editors above, and if your favorite isn’t on the list – please tell us about it in the comments.
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