10 Best Code Editors for Software Developers in 2021
How much time do you spend in your code editor when you’re programming? It’s pretty high, right? Using a powerful editor can have an enormous impact on your productivity and workflow. Yet, while code editors have the same base premise, they aren’t all created equal, and each has something unique to set them apart from others.
Today, we’ll outline a selection of the 10 best code editors available right now, explain their features, and help you pick the one that suits you best. There are options for both experienced developers and beginners, editors for collaboration and real-time code sharing, and IDEs, meaning you can do a lot more with them than simply write code.
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code is an open-source code editor software developed by Microsoft. Of the code editors in this list, it’s probably the closest to being an IDE. You may find the program slow to start. Yet, given its robust features, Visual Studio Code has quickly risen in popularity as one of the best code editors among developers.
Platform: Windows, Mac OS, Linux
- Built-in Git support
- In-editor debugging
- Large library of extensions and plugins
- IntelliSense (intelligent code completion)
- Very robust
Vim is an advanced text editor open-source tool which is also considered to be an IDE in its way. The program is navigated entirely via the keyboard, making it much faster and more efficient — but only if you make an effort to learn how to operate it. There is no question that VIM is the most challenging code editor to learn on this list. Yet, it can really increase your productivity. Advanced developers love it because of how customizable and lightweight it is and because there’s no need to touch the mouse for the most part.
Platform: Windows, Mac OS, Linux
- Extensive plugin system
- Good for keyboarders
- Custom commands
- Support for hundreds of programming languages and file formats
- Rock-solid and very fast
Sublime Text
Sublime Text is a beautiful, feature-rich code editor. It is lightweight, open, and ready to edit your file almost as soon as you’ve managed to click the button. Its responsiveness, performance, and User Experience make it the best code editor in its class. Unlike some of the other text editors featured here, though, Sublime Text isn’t free. However, for some users, the extra features make it definitely worth paying for.
Platform: Windows, Mac OS, Linux
Developer: Sublime HQ
- Lightweight
- Project switching at the snap of a finger
- Split editing
- Keyboard shortcuts
- Distraction-free writing mode
- Plugins and expandability
Atom, which describes itself as a ‘hackable text editor for the 21st century’, is one of the most customizable text editors around. While inspired by Sublime Text, Atom strove to take that editor’s features to the next step. It also simplified the UI so that users could have a clean experience. All these choices have skyrocketed its popularity and resulted in a passionate community ready to stand behind it. However, if compared with many other code editors, Atom is quite slow to start, and many developers experience performance issues.
Platform: Windows, Mac OS, Linux
- GitHub integration
- Smart autocompletion
- Snippets
- Extremely customizable
Notepad++
Notepad++ is a popular free-to-use code editor written in C++. Having been around since 2003, Notepad++ is an incredible, simple option not just for beginners but developers at any level. A lot of professional devs use Notepad++ as their daily driver because it’s light, efficient, and does what it needs to do.
Developer: Don Ho
- Highly customizable
- Auto-completion
- Syntax highlighting and folding
- Multi-view and multi-language support
Brackets
Created by Adobe in 2014, Brackets is a code editor made with both programmers and designers in mind. It’s designed to be minimal yet powerful and offers some unique features. One of those is Extract, a tool that allows you to extract information such as colors, fonts, gradients, and measurements, directly from PSDs as clean CSS.
Platform: Windows, Mac OS, Linux
- Live preview
- Preprocessor support
- Inline editors
- Pleasant looking UI
- Especially suited to macOS
Bluefish
Bluefish is an advanced text editor with a variety of tools for programming and website development. Designed as a compromise between plain text editors and full programming IDEs, Bluefish is lightweight, fast, and easy to learn while providing many IDE features.
Platform: Windows, Mac OS, Linux, OpenBSD, and Solaris
Developer: Bluefish Dev Team
- Starts really quick and loads hundreds of files within seconds
- Multiple document interface
- The project support feature helps you to work efficiently on multiple projects
- Powerful search and replace
- Unlimited undo/redo functionality
- Auto-recovery
NetBeans
NetBeans is an open-source integrated development environment (IDE) that developers can use to develop applications using programming languages like PHP, Java, and C++, among many others. It is one of those rare code editors where one can highlight source codes syntactically. There are also several templates offered by NetBeans that can help you with the coding process.
Platform: Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Solaris
Developer: Apache Software Foundation Oracle Corporation
- Helps you to write bug-free code
- Fast and smart code editing
- Easy and efficient project management
- Rich set of community provided plugins
- Rapid user interface development
UltraEdit
UltraEdit is a text editor by IDE Computer Solutions. It’s known for its performance, speed, and customization abilities, along with some nice-looking themes. From regular text editing to web development and file comparing, UltraEdit provides an impressive set of key features that come at a reasonable price.
Platform: Windows, Mac OS, Linux
Developer: IDM Computer Solution
- Multi-caret editing
- License is good for up to 3 machines on any combination of platforms
- HTML live preview
- Column/block editing
- You’re able to edit extremely large files
Codeshare
Codeshare is an online code editor with an emphasis on sharing code in real-time. Developers no longer have to be in the same room to see and edit changes. This is highly beneficial for interviews, troubleshooting, teaching. Codeshare is free, but if you want to keep the code for longer than 24 hours, you’ll have to sign up.
Platform: Windows, Mac OS, Linux
- Free and no sign up required
- Your code can be saved if you sign up for a free account
- Real-time sharing
- Integrated video chat solution for logging in multiple members of your team
- Syntax highlighting
Conclusion
Now that we’ve taken a look at 10 of the best code editors available right now, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below. Let us know if you’ve used any of these options and what your favorite feature is. Also, mention any other editors that we might have missed — we will add them to the next update.
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10 Best Code Editor Apps for Your Mac
Text editors are software created specifically for manipulating text in several file type formats. And while they all feature the same fundamental functions, not all text editors are evidently created equal – some are simply for editing text and feature basic editing commands while others are so advanced it wouldn’t take a lot to convert them into an environment for advanced coding with debugging functionality.
Today, we bring you a line up of text editors for Mac users that are sure to meet all your coding requirements while offering reliability and security.
1. Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code is an open-source source code editor created and maintained by Microsoft. It is designed with beauty, ease-of-use, and speed in mind, coupled with support for tons of programming languages and file types among other features.
Visual Studio Code is customizable with themes, extendable with functions, and configurable with custom scripts. It is 100% free and you can check out our list of its best extensions for programmers.
Visual Studio Code
2. Atom
Atom is an advanced and completely customizable source code editor developed and maintained by GitHub with speed, beauty, flexibility, and reliability in mind. It features a minimalist UI with support for extensions, scripts, tons of programming languages, Git and GitHub integration, Teletype, etc.
Atom Code Editor
3. Sublime Text
Sublime Text is a world-famous lightweight, feature-rich source code editor. It is completely customizable, supports 50+ languages out of the box, extensible with plugins, and scriptable.
Sublime Text is currently in version 3 and although it offers a paid license, it doesn’t restrict any features to paid users and the license is there in order to support developers. So if you like using ST3 and can afford the license, give a helping hand.
4. Komodo Edit
Komodo Edit is a 100% free and open-source text editor built to complement its sibling proprietary application, Komodo IDE. Its features include multiple selections, a toolbox, auto-complete, commando, skins & icon sets, a minimap, a projects manager, etc.
5. Brackets
Brackets is a free source code editor created by Adobe Systems with the main focus on web development. It is written in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, which makes it the ideal web developer’s text editor.
Brackets text editor features a slick, minimalist UI, live preview which allows users to see code changes to their program in real-time, tons of extensions to add its functionality, etc.
Brackets – Code Editor
6. Coda
Coda is a powerful text editor designed with built-in support for working with both local and remote files. It also features a beautiful UI, a built-in debugger, web kit preview and inspector, a terminal, etc. Coda is available for Mac users at $99 and it has app versions for iPhone and iPad users.
Coda – Code Editor
7. BBEdit
BBEdit is a freemium text editor that offers an easy-to-understand UI excellent for navigating directories and working with files among other features such as an advanced search and replace function, full UTF-8 support, character encoding conversion, FTP/SFTP support, etc.
BBEdit contains premium features which news users can evaluate for 30 days free of charge. Its free version is an excellent stand-alone app but you will need to purchase a license to access its paid functionality.
BBEdit – Code Editor
8. GNU Emacs
GNU Emacs is a libre, extensible and customizable command line-based text editor that is fundamentally a Lisp interpreter for Emacs with support for extensions that enable it to edit text. Its features include self-documentation, full Unicode support for virtually any script type, customization, support for working with a GUI, a packaging system for installing extensions, and many more.
9. TextMate
TextMate is a powerful, customizable and open-source free text editor with a rich feature set that includes multiple carets, Unix commands, scoped settings, version control, advanced file search, support for tons of programming languages right out of the box, etc.
It also features a clean UI and navigable file tree which encourages users to focus less on distractions and more on the dexterity of their code.
10. Espresso
Espresso is an advanced web editor built for Mac users to build delightful, speedy, and innovative websites as it combines virtually all the tools they will need into a single working environment such as CSSEdit tools, Server sync, a Navigator, Live Preview with Browser Xray, Dynamo auto-building, and an exceptionally beautiful UI compliant with the macOS aesthetic.
Espresso is last on this list but eons away from the least given its rich feature set and advanced user options. It is going for an affordable price of $75.
Expresso – Code Editor
So, there you have it. All of the above-mentioned text editors offer the important features you will need to write and edit functioning source code of anything from a basic Python script to a professionally-written Java program. It is left to you to decide which ones appeal to you best.
In the meantime, remember to share this article and feel free to share your recommendations and experiences in the comments section below.
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