My Top 5 Free Text Editors For Web Development

 

Hey what's going on guys so choosing a text editor is a big deal to some people especially if you're just getting started and I think it's a good idea to test different editors out and see what works best for you. There's various reasons people use different editors you have different built-in features, plugins, look and style, keyboard shortcuts, workflow and a ton of other factors that go into it. So in this blog post I simply want to give my top 5 picks for free text editors.

To be clear these are not IDEs or integrated development environments. IDEs are much more intricate with extensive debugging, testing, compiling and so on. These are strictly text editors which are what most web developers use. I also want to make it clear that this is my opinion. If my number 5 is your number 1 or your number 1 is my number 5 or whatever, it just means that something else works better for you than it works for me and that goes for anybody. So there's no set in stone list this is just my opinion so let's go ahead and get started.

5. Komodo Edit

Komodo edit is not to be confused with the Komodo IDE because they do have an integrated development environment which I don't believe is free and it's much more robust as it's an IDE. I do have limited experience with this particular editor relative to the rest on this list.

What I got from it when I used it was it was extremely simple and it had a very minimal design. As you can see from the thumbnail it looks very minimal which is to me a good thing. A lot of times less is more. When you open up something like Eclipse or let's say Visual Studio, not Visual Studio Code but just Visual Studio the IDE, it's so overwhelming because there's just so many little buttons and menu options and sidebars. Komodo seems really straightforward and I think that's what I liked most about it.

It has something called focus mode which will hide all the open windows and just display the editor. This limits distraction and lets you focus on exactly what you need to. There's also this big go to anything text box where you can do just that. You can search for files, install plugins, open menu items and just about anything else from that one text box. It kind of reminds me of VS Code's command palette.

It also has cursor history, meaning in addition to redoing and undoing specific actions you can redo and undo where your cursor goes. It also has built-in FTP connection capability so that you can connect remotely to servers and update files on your hosts. It also has built-in browser preview which is always helpful. So rather than going outside of the editor and opening your HTML files or whatever you're working on you can preview it through the editor. I think overall simplicity is the biggest advantage of Komodo Edit.

4. Brackets

Brackets is really geared towards web designers and front-end developers, meaning you know HTML, CSS, JavaScript. In my experience, you don't see too many developers writing PHP or Python or anything like that using Brackets. I used it for about six months a long time ago, there may be some new features since then.

Again, like Komodo Edit, the interface is very very simple. I do like the syntax highlighting, the color coded HTML tags and attributes. When I used Brackets back in the day I loved the live preview feature. It works sort of like VS Code's live server extension except it's built into the editor. It opens your HTML files on your localhost I think on port 3000 and any changes that you make when you save in your editor it refreshes the browser and shows your changes which is really nice. Brackets was the first editor where I actually saw something like this built in and I really loved it.

There's also different themes; there's a light theme here. I prefer the dark theme, I think a lot of developers do but you know they have some others as well. The keyboard shortcuts are also really helpful. They're easy to use and they can make you work much quicker. No matter what editor you use I would highly suggest learning some helpful keyboard shortcuts.

3. Sublime Text

I debated putting it on here because Sublime Text technically isn't free. There is a commercial license but the free version does give you all the capabilities of the commercial. It's just that every now and again you'll get a pop-up that asks you if you want to buy a license. You also get this little "unregistered" in the title bar here.

Sublime Text is awesome, I have used it for years. I don't use it anymore but I did use it for years and I think what makes it stick out is its performance. It's incredibly fast. It's built from custom components and I find it faster than any editor that I've used. In fact, I use it now just for like opening quick text files or dot files, things like that. When I need to open a single file really quickly I use Sublime Text so it's basically my notepad. Not only that, I usually use it for my preview code. So when I do a tutorial or a course I have my sample code outside of the screen where you guys can't see it in Sublime Text.

Some other features:

• The command palette holds in frequently-used functionality like sorting, changing the syntax, changing the indentation settings, things like that.
• With just a few keystrokes you can search for what you want without having to navigate through the menus or remembering key bindings.
• There's also a very powerful API and package ecosystem. It uses a Python API that allows plugins to augment built-in functionality. Package Control can be installed through the command palette. You can install thousands of packages built by the community.

Now the biggest downside to Sublime in my opinion is I really don't think it's very intuitive and user friendly. You may disagree with me if you've been using it for a while and you know the ins and outs. But I think a lot of the features, although it's a very very powerful tool, I think a lot of the features are sort of hidden. I think they could do a much better job of making certain things easier to use including the whole command palette and the package control workflow. I think that's the biggest negative at least for me. But overall it's a very professional and very powerful editor.

2. Atom

The order of this list aside from Komodo Edit is the order that I actually use these text editors. So before the number one I used Atom, before that Sublime Text, before that Brackets.

Atom in my opinion is one of the easiest and the most intuitive text editors when it comes to interface. Everything is very very self-explanatory. Everything seems to be in the right place. Customization and settings are easy to change. There's also a phenomenal package manager to extend Atom. I also think Atom is one of the nicest looking if not the nicest looking editor. Some of the themes that are available are absolutely beautiful.

Key features:

• You have real-time collaboration. This is something that's been added since I've used it. It seems really cool for pair coding, working with teams and so on.
• It also has built-in GitHub integration to increase your workflow when it comes to getting version control.

Now I'm saying this from the perspective of about a year ago but I think the biggest downside to Atom is its performance. When I used it on basically a super machine with an i7, 32 gigs of RAM it was fine. But when I tried using it on a less powerful laptop or something like that, it really lagged. That was a huge negative that at least in my opinion I think that you know when you use a text editor it needs to just be flawless, it needs to fly and Atom really lagged behind. I don't know if they fixed it since then they may have, there may have been some improvements over the past whatever year and a half, two years since I've used it.

1. Visual Studio Code

Number one is obviously Visual Studio Code. You guys have seen me use it for the past two years or so. I can't really say enough about this editor. It's incredibly fast and intuitive. I wouldn't say it's as fast as Sublime in my experience but it makes up for it in just about every other area.

Its built-in tabbed terminal is amazing and it's one of the features that really pulled me in when I was using Atom. You can install terminal plugins in a lot of other editors but a lot of the times they're really wonky, they don't work right. The terminal in VS Code is just awesome. I know WebStorm is another great editor that has a terminal but I don't believe it's free which is why it's not on this list. I don't really have any experience with it but I've heard great things about it.

I think VS Code has the best extensions by far. I don't care what language or framework you're working in, you'll almost always find an extension that does all that you need in terms of highlighting, IntelliSense and snippets, much much more. The keyboard shortcuts are amazing and easily customized. It makes for very very fast workflow.

Emmet is a fantastic tool which allows you to use shortcuts to write HTML and CSS really quickly. While Emmet is available for almost all text editors as some sort of plugin or extension, it actually comes built in with VS Code. It's great for almost any language and definitely anything related to web development: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, ASP.NET. The list goes on and there's extensions for all of these languages as well.

It has a powerful debugger with some extra tools that almost make it a borderline IDE without the performance constraints of an IDE. You also have easy peer sharing so you can connect and work with other people in your editor remotely. There's a lot more that I could put on this list but it just wouldn't fit. So that's definitely my number one and I don't see myself using a different text editor for quite a while unless they come up with something really really cool.