We're sure at some point, a visually-oriented app will come along and make text editors obsolete overnight. But people have been gleefully predicting the demise of the 'old way' of designing and developing websites for years, and yet text editors just won't die. Those who love text editors swear they are advantageous for speed and control, the best-in-class apps making a designer or developer more efficient. Here's our list of 18 excellent text editors for a range of platforms, ideal whether you're bathed in the glow of an iMac screen, hammering away on a PC laptop, or frantically trying to update a client website using a tablet while connected to flaky beach Wi-Fi. If we've missed your favourite, let us know about the app in the comments and why you think it's great. • Platform: Windows • Price: Free We admit there's a whiff of nostalgia about this entry, given that Notepad++ was one of the earliest text editors we used on Windows.
But the app deserves its place on this list, because it can still compete with the best of them. For no money whatsoever, you get a capable (if sometimes workmanlike) editor with plenty of features, and you can also mess about with the interface to make it better suit your requirements. • Platform: OSX 10.8 or later, Windows 7 & 8, Linux • Price: Free Launched in 2008, GitHub has become the code storage and development site of choice worldwide, and so any tool it releases is going to cause a big stir.
Atom is the best code editor, the team that has developed the application is called a hackable text editor. It is a freeware and open source editor developed by GitHub, with the support of syntax highlighting and autocomplete.
Microsoft Text Editor Free Download
That's certainly been the case with Atom. Dubbed 'a hackable text editor for the 21st Century', it's designed to be simple to use out of the box, but also easily expandable using hundreds of packages. Since launching in invite-only private beta early last year, it's now fully open source and available to download for free. • Platform: Windows/OS X/Linux • Price: Free Adobe's open-source text editor is created from the code that builds the web, and the developers note that if you can code in Brackets, then you can code on Brackets. In other words, although you initially get a simple, usable editor, seasoned programmers should be able to hack it to their liking. • Platform: Windows/OS X/Linux • Price: $70/about £45 Available across all of the three main desktop platforms, Sublime Text is a great general-purpose text editor that offers plenty of power to anyone working on websites. It's especially well suited to anyone wedded to the keyboard, providing powerful shortcuts and tools to leap about a document, make (multiple) selections, filter the file, and quickly make edits.