Web Developer's Text Editor

If you're serious about editing web pages you'll need yourself a good text editor which is dedicated to your profession. Because Microsoft notepad just isn't good enough. You don't shovel sand with a teaspoon so you don't use a plain text editor to edit your HTML documents.

A good editor should be easy to maintain and lightweight. Preferably, you should edit your HTML code directly rather than using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor like Dreamweaver. WYSIWYG editors are great for designers but that's exactly what they are: Designing tools. That is: they let you control the visual layout of the web document without knowing any HTML or CSS. In my opinion it is this that concept has primarily lead to the Tableless Design phenomenon.

You'll need configurable shortcut keys as reaching for the mouse slows you down. Old School Editors like Emacs and vi are specifically designed to keep your hands as close to the centre position on your keyboard as they can. When I used to contract and work in various sweatshops, I used to be able to tell how good another web developer was by how many times they reached for the mouse. And when I say old school: Emacs began it's development in the 70s just after I was invented.

As I read in The Pragmatic Programmer (buy it!) you should use one editor well and use it for everything. You should be able to use the one editor for code, text files and even email if you're using a popular one. Emacs (the editor that does everything) keybindings are available for Eclipse but is a little difficult to set up well. Emacs is very very powerful but has a massive learning curve.

Years and years ago the industry standard HTML editor used to be Homesite. This was originally built by Bradbury Software which was bought out by Allaire (of Cold Fusion fame) which them got bought out by Macromedia (who released Dreamweaver 1.x) and then was bought by Adobe (who built photoshop). It's current version is 5.5 and version 5 was released by Macromedia some time in 2001. As you might have guessed, it has passed its glory days. In the old days of Homesite, the use of such technologies like server side includes and version control was less prevalent and it's feature list (Global site management and inbuilt FTP) reflects that.

These days, your preferred text editor should support validation, multi-document, auto-completion, syntax highlighting, code folding, documentation lookup of your favourite language and should integrate with popular version control software. Some development tools like Eclipse are extensible platforms that you can adapt rather than dedicated editors built for a specific language. Eclipse can edit Java, PHP, .NET and much more.

I would like to point out here that it is not necessary for your code editor to manage FTP. There are many good free FTP applications that can perform this task. And if you're FTPing code around a lot then you're doing something wrong. You shouldn't need to FTP files to a server for testing if you've got your local network set up well. Transferring files around by FTP all day is just way too slow. Here's a little info on setting up a LAMP server. Just a little 'cause I am not a System Administrator

So what are some of the top code editors today?

If you're a n00b in the industry, thankfully you have much more choice than me when I started out. You can now get a number or lightweight editors and a few powerful ones for FREE! Yes, free, absolutely nothing to pay for the next unlimited months interest free. Thank the Open Source Community an The Cloud for that.

Visual Studio
Visual Studio is Microsoft's main IDE for its Web Applications for the .NET Framework. It's extensible so you can get it to work with your favourite version control package and do cool stuff like Form Design, Database schemas as well as GUI Applications and Class design. It's well supported by Microsoft and is easy to use. Probably its biggest bummer is that it's not free or maybe that it's not designed for any *nix development.

Text Wrangler and BBEdit
You might remember BBedit if you have been using a Mac. This was the alternative of Homesite in the early days and it was a stellar product. This has evolved to Text Wrangler. This is a solid Unix friendly editor. It's got many of the features mentioned above and is a robust programmers tool. Text Wrangler is free and BBEdit costs a little for the extra features like: Code Folding, Clippings and editable preferences. This was my most used tool when I was a junior.

Eclipse
Eclipse is a very powerful editor and it most probably has a plug in for your language. Eclipse is an Integrated Development Environment and you can extend it with many of the free plugins available. If you're a PHP developer, you may be interested to know that the PDT plugin is now supported by Zend. Like all good software Eclipse runs on Windows and Linux but it can be a handful to get up and running and Eclipse takes a little care to maintain. Eclipse supports good debugging techniques.

Notepadd++
I have heard a lot favourable comments about Notepadd++. It's an Open Source product so it's Free as in beer. Surprisingly enough, Notepad++ is a one man project and very well featured so its developer must be very talented but it can result in a few bugs.

Quanta Plus
I have spend some time using Quanta Plus and can report that it's a nice package. It's got code folding, syntax highlighting and inline documentation of php. It uses the KDE libraries but will run on Gnome. If you don't know what those are then it's not going to run on your computer.

WYMEditor
WYMeditor is a web-based WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) XHTML editor. WYSIWYG Editors let you control the visual aspect of a web page whereas a WYSIWYM editor is concerned with the schematic layout of the web page only. So far this is only integrated into other browser based editors but is something to keep your eye on.