Text editors speed up your workflow.
And best code editors have a great impact on your productivity.
But, many professionals stick with ‘what they know’ out of their lazy habit.
If you scroll through instead, you could uncover the kind of fast and intuitive interface or killer features that merely reinforce you to get your work done more quickly and effortlessly.
Typically, text editors, or source code editors, enable developers to generate and edit text used by programs. Text editors are flexible, lightweight, and have several features to ease writing and orchestrate code. This helps experts ease the methods of coding, searching, locating, creating shortcuts, and or customizing UI.
The best text editors for web development come with various features, such as:
- A fast and flexible interface to make you more efficient at writing code
- Functionality to help you examine code for mistakes
- Features to discover where edits need to be made
- Syntax highlighting to ease visually scanning text
- Formatting and table editing, similar to word processors
- AutoComplete feature for repeated words and functions
- Shortcuts to quickly navigate code
- Plugins and API, package ecosystem
- Text folding (or code folding) to hide, reduce visible text on-screen
Below are the 7 best text editors for web development services you can use. Let’s get a move on to explore.
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Let’s begin.
1# Sublime Text
It is a refined text editor for code, markup, and prose. The best code editor – but you’ll have to pay for it.
However, Sublime Text comes with a free version for testing. You will have to pay for its extended version. Although the chargeable amount may sound steep, licenses are issued per-user, unlike per machine. So, you can use Sublime Text on many computers and operating systems.
Many developers working in website development companies use Sublime Text, because of its speed, and simplicity. Keyboard shortcuts, one of its features, are very useful when working on different scripting languages, such as Javascript.
Key Features and Benefits
- AutoComplete feature
- Code Folding
- Syntax highlighting feature
Customizable — more than 3,800 packages available
- Lightweight, fast, and stable
- Crazily extensible with ever-growing plugins lists that are available to install via the package manager
- Sublime Text is free to download and start using
Drawback
The drawback is that there is no decent GIT plugin yet. Slow development and not friendly for beginners.
Platforms: Windows, Mac OS, Linux
2# Atom
Atom is open-source, customizable, and available for free. It has been designed specially or developers so experienced developers have hardly any problem working with Atom. This open-source framework features clean collaboration tools, a sleek editor, and some great organizational tools to keep your projects in check.
What makes Atom optimum is its ‘Teletype Feature’, which allows many developers to work at the same time, on the same project, and on the same code from anywhere across the globe. So, your projects can be edited in real-time.
Key Features and Benefits
- Clean and Simple User Interface
- Desktop application for Web Technologies
- It has Modular Design
- It contains more than 50 open-source extension/packages
- All packages can be integrated around a minimal core
- GitHub package is available to integrate and fix resolving merge conflicts
- Option to search for new themes and packages from the text editor
- Easily edit your code with smart autocompletion, a file system browser, and a find and replace feature.
- Atom comes with several panes to compare and edit code side by side
- Snippets, Node.js Integration, File System Browser, Hackable Approach are other features
Drawback
Atom has performance issues. It is slow compared to other text editors, especially if you install several extensions and packages.
Platform – You can use Atom for Operation Systems (OS): Windows, Mac, and Linux.
3# Visual Studio Code
One of the younger text editors, Visual Studio Code is an open-source platform, which is downloaded directly to macOS, Windows, or Linux for free. It provides developers with a new choice of development tool for the core code-edit-debug cycle. It is easy, fast, and can integrate with GIT. Like Atom, many developers can work remotely on the same product code using Visual Studio Code.
Key Features and Benefits
- Lightweight, and fast
- Available for Free
- Built-in Terminal
- Simple and Clean User Interface
- Multiple Cursor
- Features Terminal, WebView, Live Share
- Vast community support to build additional resource and extensions
- Come with Emmet extension, super fast HTML, CSS, and Javascript coding
- Native support available for Git collaboration
Drawback
No support is available for outdated programming versions such as ASP.NET. Also, debugging features are very limited
Platforms – Visual Studio Code supports OS X, Linux, and Windows — in the Visual Studio family.
4# Espresso
Espresso is another popular text editor for web development. It is an instrumentation-based test framework, which benefits both developers and test automation engineers. If you want to create innovative, delightful, and fast websites, then Espresso is an option to be. It helps you write, code, design, build, and publish with efficiency and flair. Advanced text features include amazing Live Preview with Browser Xray, the Navigator, CSSEdit tools, Server Sync, Dynamo auto-building. Espresso covers everything whether you are starting from scratch or tweaking a live site.
Key Features and Benefits
- Espresso workflow is simple to use
- It is fast, actually very fast available for developers on the market
- No issue with coding wait processing for UI elements
- No need to write any custom waits, syncs, and polls
- All the wizardry “synchronization”, happens without your involvement
- All the tools necessary to “make PoC” are free and quite user-friendly
- Easy developing espresso test automation
- Live Preview feature to see the results of your editing/styling
Drawback
Espresso requires access to the application’s source code. With no source code, you cannot do anything. Also, if you require UI testing for Both Android and iOS, then you will need to write twice for two different systems.
Platform – MacOS
5# Brackets
Brackets is Adobe’s open-source editor, offering modern, open-source solutions to developers for creating websites. It is a free text editor with certain appealing visual technologies to preview your work. This source code editor allows front-end developers to check changes. Since Brackets is affiliated with Adobe, it is integrated with Photoshop that allows it to accept PSD files and generate code for your project.
Brackets does not support many languages for syntax highlighting as some of the others. However, it still has quite a few. Since Brackets focuses on front end technologies, it also supports CSS preprocessors like Less and Sass.
Key Features and Benefits
- Brackets have code completion. As you type code, there will be an auto-suggestion
- Ability to add several extensions and packages to make it more powerful and useful
- It comes with multiple cursors features
- It has a Color picker feature because color hex codes are difficult to remember
- It allows ‘Live Preview’ to see the results of your editing/styling
Drawback
Brackets are focused on the Front-end side. It has been made for Frontend Developers. It is useful in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. But it is not much beneficial on the server-side languages
Platforms – Since it is an open Source and Cross-Platform, it is used in Mac, Windows, and Linux.
6# Coda 2
Coda2 is the latest version of Coda, which is for all the MacOS lovers. It has many unique features, including a CSS override and local indexing for editing CSS on live websites. It has a publishing tool that helps developers track all their files outside of the Coda app. Any of these remote files can be saved and published directly into the text editor.
Like others, Coda features syntax highlighting, code folding, and autocompletes. Moreover, it offers a unique editing option, called a wildcard token that allows you to rapidly generate items like gradients and colors as you type.
Key Features and Benefits
- Excellent basic tools to work with many languages
- Faster Syntax highlighting (4 to 10 times faster)
- Easy file management. The file can be edited remotely through FTP or Amazon S3 servers
- You can access your local files and publish them remotely
- Customizable column guide. Color-coded traditional or visual tabs
- Edit your code remotely, or even check previews on your iPhone or iPad while editing in Coda
- Track and publish files modified outside of Coda
- Additional tools include CSS overriding, Panic syncing for passwords and private keys
- Local indexing to autocomplete anything right from functions to classes
- Sync your sites with private keys, and passwords to all of your Mac devices
Drawback
Coda2 is currently available for $99 USD from panic.com, which is very expensive. Also, it is complex and not good for beginners. It does not have a Dreamweaver like the AutoComplete feature.
Platform – MacOS
7# Notepad++
Notepad++ is a free text editor for use under Microsoft Windows. This source code editor supports around 80 programming languages with code folding and syntax highlighting. It enables developers to work on various open files in a single window. This is possible due to the tabbed editing interface. So many text editors with advanced features are available in the market. So, the demand for notepad ++ has slightly declined. Notepad ++ has many features for developers.
Key Features and Benefits
- Easy file read, write access. Features to read many file formats
- Auto-indentation to more easily create/review code
- Color-coding to view development language, which is very helpful
- The auto-saving feature to prevent any loss when the system crashes
- Language’s color-coded syntax is extremely helpful for quickly analyzing and dissecting code
- Plugins for different purposes to continually adapt and expand for continued use
- Features to easily compare two documents and identify differences- line by line
Drawbacks
Since Notepad ++ has multiple options, sometimes they become confusing for developers. A lot of hot buttons put developers in a dilemma regarding what button does what. No frameworks languages like Django or CakePhp.
Platform: Only works in Windows.
Over to You
As we have discussed the 7 best text editors that are available for free and on a payment basis, paid editors are available for installation on a per-user or per-machine basis. As usual, these text editors come with more advanced API, professional support, and some IDE like extensibility.
Choose whatever source code editor you think is suitable to keep you more productive, allow you to have a more user-friendly website, which is good for SEO Services as well.
Always choose text editors wisely. Or hire vetted website developers from a leading digital marketing agency in Toronto to avoid any issue.