October 10, 2015

 

Web Design: Comparing Text Editors

If you're interested in learning to code for the web, there are some excellent editors available now. I'm going to talk about four of them: Notepad++, Sublime Text, Atom, and Brackets. The latter two I only recently discovered.

All you need to build a website is a simple text editor, such as the one bundled with your computer's operating system. Notepad on Windows, TextEdit on Mac, or gEdit for Linux will do just fine. If you're serious about coding you should consider trying a more advanced text editor that helps make coding more intuitive. A good text editor is worth it's code in gold. (But note, the four options I describe below are either free, or low cost).

Clockwise from top left: Notepad++, Sublime Text, Atom, Brackets.

Text Editors vs WYSIWYG Editors vs IDEs

Before I get into text editors I'd like to point out that in the world of web authoring there are primarily three kinds of tools often used: Text editors, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors, and IDEs (Integrated Development Environments). IDEs manage the whole process of web site management from editing the code, to managing the files locally, to uploading to a web server.

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