While there are a number of paid solutions out there for editing your code, not everyone has hundreds of dollars in their budget to get them on their desktop. Luckily, there are numerous free solutions for just about every style of editing that you can think of. We focused this list on cross-platform, Mac OS X-only and Windows-only downloadable solutions, but we did include one online option. We hope in the future there will be more of these out there so you can truly collaborate with other members of your team.
Take a look through the list of 18 editors, and you are bound to find one that is perfect for your needs! Cross-Platform Editors: A mixture of WYSIWYG Web editing tool and a browser that was originally developed by Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA) and later acquired by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The project is open source and since it is a test bed, it features support for protocols and languages not yet supported by the major browsers, such as RDF. The program is available for Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Amiga OS and more. ADVERTISEMENT--: A Java-based editor that features the ability to edit multiple documents, a built-in FTP client so you can upload changes without leaving the interface, user-defined templates, user-customizable toolbars and several other features.: The only cloud editor in the list, Bespin is a project from Mozilla Labs. It is a completely cloud-based Web editor project built to encourage collaborative working as it can be accessed from anywhere. The Web application allows for syntax highlighting of Arduino, CSS, HTML, JavaScript and PHP.
Syntax highlighting – Syntax highlighting makes it easy to visually parse large amounts of code because specific items or item types are denoted with a different color or font. This is a common feature for tools that support markup languages such as HTML and CSS, which is the main focus of most text editors. Calling itself a text editor “for the 21st century,” Atom earned a lot of praise in the nominations round for being a text editor designed for the needs of today’s developers.
You can read previous coverage of Bespin on SitePoint and.: Bluefish has been around in various formats since 1997 with only one constant staff member, Olivier Sessink. The program features customizable syntax highlighting for C, ColdFusion, CSS, HTML, Java, JavaScript, JSP, Perl, Python, Ruby, SQL, XHTML and more.
It is considered by some to fill a gap between plain text editors and larger IDE development platforms and runs on Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows.: This editor was written with Java as the original primary language it works with, but thanks to numerous plugins, you can also edit in languages such as Perl, PHP, Python and more. Due to the open source nature, plugins are welcome for any language a developer feels like building one for. Due to Eclipse being nothing more than a run-time kernel, the program runs a bit more like a platform for plugins than anything else.
This allows the overall program to be extremely lightweight, and you can install only the bits and pieces you need without weighing yourself down with excessive features. The program runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.: J is a text editor written in Java that will work on any system with Java 1.4 installed, but 1.5 is recommended. This editor was updated in March 2009, although before that it hadn’t been touched since September 2004. The program runs on Linux, Mac OS X, OS/2, Unix, VMS, and Windows. : In development since 1998, this Java-based editor has not had a major release since 2004, but has had numerous preview releases. While it is not the most current editor out there, the system does feature indenting and syntax highlighting for over 130 different programming languages.