Five Best Code Editors For Web Development

As web developers we have a lot of options for integrated development environments (IDE). These code editors make our job much easier. With so many options how do we know which one we should use? In this post we'll discuss the top five code editors you should use as web developer.

For some people using a simple text editor like Notepad or Notepad++ is the answer. I disagree. Notepad++ and other text editors like TextPad may offer syntax highlighting and have plugins but they are lacking some of the fundamental features these other code editors have.

Below I've compiled a list of my favorite editors in no particular order. If you disagree please leave a comment below!

Atom Editor

A Hackable Text Editor

Atom is a highly customizable open source text editor created by the good people at Github. It supports plugins, is available for all platforms and is easy to use.

What makes Atom one of my favorites is how easy it was to use and setup. In a matter of minutes I found a bunch of plugins for Ember.js, Phoenix, Elixir, and more. I was up and running in minutes.

Brackets

A modern, open source text editor that understands web design.

Brackets is a open source editor written mainly for use with web development. It was created by Adobe and offers support for all major operating systems.

Brackets is very similar to Atom. When I was first hunting for a Windows editor I used Brackets. It was easy to use and had a handful of plugins. I only switched to Atom a year ago, only because I though brackets didn't have as many plugins.

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose.
You'll love the slick user interface, extraordinary features and amazing performance.

Sublime is a proprietary closed platform text editor. It supports all major operating systems and many programming languages. It has a robust, huge plugin system.

Sublime is a great text editor and has been around since 2008. It has very quick navigation, with quick keyboard navigation. Since it's been around so long, it has a huge community around it.

Webstorm

The smartest JavaScript IDE

Webstorm is a lightweight but powerful IDE, with support for both client and server JavaScript code. Webstorm is created by JetBrains and is a closed proprietary system.

I've used WebStorm and some of JetBrains other IDE's when I was learning to program. WebStorm worked really fast, and had native support for many popular frameworks. If you have a little extra money, I would recommend looking into WebStorm.

Vim

the ubiquitous text editor

Vim, otherwise known as Vi IMproved, is a clone of the original Vi text editor Bill Joy created for the Unix operating system. It's a cross platform, open source, project that has become very, very popular.

Vim at it's heart is a text editor. However, many plugins are available to make it into a fully functional IDE. Vim has almost a religious cult following by developers. I use it exclusively when I ssh into boxes for my work.

Honorable Mention

GNU Emacs

An extensible, customizable, free/libre text editor — and more.

GNU Emacs is a free, as in free speech, text editor created by Richard Stallman in 1985.

Emacs deserves an honorable mention since it's still being used all over the world by many different developers. It's highly extensible with thousands of built in commands that can be chained together in macros. If you want to learn a very reliable, quick editor, learn Emacs.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed my article on the top five best code editors for web development. If you like this post please press the twitter button and share with your friends!