The 15 Most Popular Text Editors for Developers

By William Craig on March 27, 2009

For many developers, a trusty text editor is all you need for even the most
complex web applications. Whether you’re creating a site from scratch, editing
a CSS file, or messing around with configuration files on the server – a good,
solid text editor will do the trick just fine. Last week, over 600 people voted for
the text editor that they felt was the best from the large set of options out in
the market.

15. SciTE

SciTE, an open source text editor for Windows and Linux, was originally
developed to demonstrate the power of Scintilla. It has since grown into a fully-
featured text editor for developers. You can extend the default SciTE
installation with user-generated configuration files like the SciTE command-
line launcher (a simple Windows command-line tool for opening files in SciTE).

14. EditPlus

EditPlus is a Windows text editor for HTML and programming. It has syntax
highlighting for HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript (among others), a built-in web
browser (which they call Seamless Web Browser) for previewing your work and
browsing the web, and auto-completion. EditPlus isn’t free, and it costs thirty-
five buckaroos for a 1-user license.

13. E – TextEditor

E – TextEditor, or just called E, is TextMate for Windows. It has a host of useful

features that developers will appreciate such as a personal revision control
system to ease the burden of managing multiple versions of a file, ultimate
customization possibilities, and a collection of automated tasks to save you
time and improve your productivity. Check out the Keyboard Shortcuts
Cheatsheet to make writing with E more efficient.

12. GNU Emacs

GNU Emacs is an open source, cross-platform (available for various distros of

Linux, Mac OS X, and even Windows) text editor. Emacs is highly extensible
and customizable to your particular needs and has all of the things you’d
expect from a developer’s source code editor such as syntax highlighting,
ability to edit plenty of file types, and the ability to broaden its features with
extensions such as debuggers and  note managers/organizers.
11. gedit

gedit is the official open source text editor for GNOME (a desktop GUI for
Linux-based and Unix-based computers). It has a plethora of options and
features that coders will love, including syntax highlighting for many
languages, full support for UTF-8 text, remote-file editing, and file backups. It
also has a very accommodating plugin system that permits you to extend gedit.

10. TextPad

TextPad is a general purpose text editor for Windows-based systems. It has

plenty of features like a spell checker for 10 languages, a Warm Start feature
which lets you start the program from where you left off when you last opened
it, and a keystroke macro recorder for automating keystrokes (which can save
you a ton of time from typing frequently-used code), and lots more.

9. UltraEdit

UltraEdit is a popular and powerful Windows-based text editor for developers

and programmers. It has support for languages like PHP, JavaScript, Perl,
C/C++, has built-in file management features, and has a notable and robust
search-and-replace feature. Check out their feature map to see a gallery-style
presentation of UltraEdit’s features.

8. Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver is a fully-featured IDE for web designers and developers created

by Adobe. Its built-in Code View is excellent for developers: it has syntax-
highlighting, a very smart code-hinting/auto-completion feature, and on-the-fly
syntax validation.

7. Komodo Edit / Komodo IDE

Komodo Edit is an open source, cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac) editor for
serverside languages that comes with Komodo IDE (but you can download it
separately). Developers will have a great set of features in store for them in
Komodo Edit, including code folding for tucking away lines of code you’re not
currently working on, on-the-fly syntax checking, and the ability to extend it
with various plugins.

6. Aptana

Aptana is a free, complete web development IDE that’s available as a

standalone application or as an Eclipse plugin. It has built-in support for
popular libraries like jQuery, MooTools, and Prototype to make client-side web
development easier for you.
5. PSPad

PSPad is a freeware programmer’s editor for MS Windows. It has the ability to

save sessions so that you can return to your previous set-up after you close the
program, a built-in FTP client, and a text difference feature so that you can
compare differences between several files.

4. Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor for Linux, Windows, and the Mac OS. It is very
extensible and was designed with the principle of making text editing as
efficient as possible. Many consider it to be a programmer’s text editor, and
even an IDE. Vim is charityware, meaning that donations to the project go to
charities.

3. Coda

Coda is a web development environment for the Mac OS. It’s powerful and
elegant text editor has all the features you’d expect from an application made
for developers: syntax highlighting, line numbers, and auto-completion. It also
has the ability for live collaboration (based on the Subetha Engine) and a Clips
feature which is a floating window that stores frequently used snippets
automatically.

2. TextMate

TextMate is a powerful Mac OS editor for programmers and designers. It allows

you to theme the interface to your preference, auto completes character pairs
like parenthesis and brackets, and allows you to run shell commands from
within a document.

1. Notepad++

Garnering close to a quarter of the total votes, Notepad++ stands to be the most
popular text editor for developers. Notepad++ is a free source code editor for
Windows released under the GPL license. Its features are too many to mention,
but among the notable ones are: macro-recording and playback for repetitive
keystrokes, a powerful regular expression search-and-replace, and support for
many programming languages.