One of the most common mistakes WordPress-newbies make is using a word processor (like Microsoft Word, Pages, and WordPerfect) to edit server-side source-code files (such as .html, .css and .php files, etc). The problem here is that word processors need to embed a lot of extra data in the file (behind the scenes) in order to define various things like font styles, etc — data that is almost always both specific to the word processor being used AND completely incomprehensible to the kind of server-side systems required to run websites (be them powered by WordPress or otherwise). The solution, however, is extremely simple: when creating and/or editing server-side files (such as those used with WordPress) be sure to only ever use a purpose-built Text Editor. Let’s take a look at a few of the best options created specifically for the task: both free and premium — for both Macs and Windows:

Premium Text Editors:

Looking for more than just a basic text editor and got the cash to spare? Then go for one of these (note: scroll down for some excellent free alternatives)…

Sublime Text (for Windows, Macs, and Linux)

Publicly released in 2008, Sublime Text is now one of the most popular and highly-regarded text editors available! One of the most notable things that sets this particular software apart is that it works across all three major platforms (Windows, OSX, and Linux) — on top of which it also supports a huge range of languages, has extensive customizability via JSON settings files (including project-specific and platform-specific settings), and offers a huge range of features including column selection and multi-select editing, auto-completion, snippets, in-editor code building and a particularly handy navigation system that lets users open files with only a few keystrokes and instantly jump to specific symbols, lines or words.

Price – $70 (note: free trial available).

BBEdit (for Macs)

Designed specifically for software developers and web designers (and with over 20 years of history), BBEdit contains powerful multi-file text searching capabilities including strong support for Perl-compatible regular expressions and GREP. It includes FTP and SFTP tools, integrates with various code management systems, supports version control, shows differences between file versions and allows for the merging of changes. Also noteworthy is the fact that the same company that makes BBEdit, also offer an entirely free version named ‘TextWrangler’ (see below) — which may very well suffice if all you’re looking for is a top-notch text editor to edit (or even create) a few source files from time to time!

Price – $49.99 (note: free trial available).

TextMate (for Macs)

Billed as ‘the missing editor’ and awarded the Apple Design Award for Best Developer Tool at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in 2006, TextMate is a much-loved text editor with a number of notable features, including declarative customizations, tabs for open documents, recordable macros, folding sections, snippets, shell integration, and an extensible bundle system. In short: it’s both a joy to use and highly-capable — what’s more, it’s also particularly well-documented — heck, it even has its own book! If you’re a hardcore coder developing on the Mac, be sure to check this one out!

Price – $54 (note: free trial available).

Free Text Editors:

Although the above premium text editors are all very very nice, if you’re only a basic/beginner developer then you may well find one of these free options will more than suffice…

Atom (for Windows, Macs and Linux)

Released on June 25th 2015, Atom is the newest text editor on this list — and a choice that professional coders everywhere will likely want to seriously consider! Written in CoffeeScript and Less, Atom is a completely free and open-source text editor with support for plugins written in Node.js — referred to by its creators as “A hackable text editor for the 21st Century”.

Atom is a text editor that’s modern and extremely user-friendly — a tool you can customize to do just about anything with. It features cross-platform editing, a built-in package manager, smart auto-completion, a file system browser, four UI and eight built-in syntax themes, multiple panes and — of course: handy find and replace features.

TextWrangler (for Macs)

The free alternative to BBEdit (see above), TextWrangler differs to its premium counterpart in a number of ways — all of which are detailed in a nice table on the official Bare Bones website here (notably lacking various HTML markup tools, text completion and file organization features). Whenever I find myself having to recommend an entirely free text editor for the Mac (or when I need to use one on someone else’s computer etc), I almost invariably go straight for this one — mainly because it’s just so darn simple to use!

Komodo Edit (for Windows, Macs, and Linux)

The free and Open-Source counterpart of Komodo IDE, Komodo Edit allows user customization through plug-ins and macros, and boasts a range of different features, including auto complete, multiple selections, smart snippets (view a complete list). The downside of all this free power though is because of its IDE roots, it perhaps isn’t quite as user-friendly as some of its simpler rivals. By all means give it a go (especially if you’re more of an advanced user), but if all you’re wanting to do is edit a few individual source files, then this one might just be a bit too daunting to start out with!

Notepad++ (for Windows)

Regarded by many as the best free text editor available for Windows (and with over 28 million downloads to date), Notepad++ is a robust, powerful and highly capable text editor that gets the job done! It supports over 50 programing languages, opens large files significantly faster than the default Windows Notepad (mentioned below) and boasts a range of impressive features, including tabbed editing (thereby allowing you to work with multiple open files in a single window), split screen, auto-completion, macros, syntax highlighting, syntax folding and a whole host of other handy functionality!

Plus two more (the Default Mac & Windows Text Editors):

Although sometimes completely overlooked, both Mac and Window operating systems both come with their own default text editors built in — and whilst they’re certainly not the best (having none of the refinements of their more fully featured counterparts), they’ll certainly do the job if all you’re looking to do is make a few simple edits…

Notepad (for Windows)

Offering only the most basic text manipulation functions, such as finding and replacing text, Notepad (not to be confused with WordPad — which is NOT a text editor) is by far the most basic text editor listed in this article — with almost none of the handy features (syntax coloring, code folding, regular expressions, macros, block-select, etc, etc) found in just about all of its 3rd party counterparts!

TextEdit (for Macs)

Mac’s default text editor, TextEdit, combines features of a text editor with those of a word processor, such as rulers, margins, and multiple font selections — allowing it to be used as both a text editor AND a basic word processor — depending on the settings/preferences. Similarly to Notepad (mentioned above), it has almost none of the numerous features found in its 3rd party rivals. While it may well do the job for a basic edit or two, if you’re intending to edit server-side files on a regular basis, you’ll do a lot better with one of the free or premium options mentioned above.

Wrapping up: How to Choose? Which is Best?

Well, first off: all seven of these text editors are built for coders and all seven are pretty darn awesome! What’s more, every one of them is available as a free trial — meaning you can give each a carefree whirl before deciding. If you’re a hardcore coder working in multiple languages you’ll probably appreciate some of the specific software development tools and high-end functionality (like multiple selections, split editing and project organization features) found only in some of the premium options (if this sounds like you then be sure to check out about the most popular premium text editing software available: Sublime Text) — update: serious coders should also be sure to check out the newest on this list: Atom — however, if you’re only a casual coder looking for a top-end text editor with basic features like syntax highlighting, macros and spell-checking, etc, then maybe start with say TextWrangler (a personal favorite of mine) if you’re on the Mac or Notepad++ if you’re a Windows user and see how you get on — after all, there’s really no need to pay top-dollar for features you’ll perhaps never use/need!

Note: For a comprehensive list of just about all the different text editors currently available check out this Wikipedia article.

Top tip: before editing any files, ALWAYS make a quick back up of them first: because there’s usually no going back once things have been overwritten without one!

Know of any other top text editors for Macs and/or Windows? Any preferences?

The 4 Best Free Text Editors

A list of freeware text editors for Windows & Mac

Windows and macOS come pre-installed with a program that can open and edit text files. It’s called TextEdit on Macs and Notepad on Windows, but neither are quite as advanced as some of the third-party applications that are available today.

Below is a list of the best free text editors. Use them to edit everything from TXT files to HTML, CSS, JAVA, VBS, PHP, BAT files, and more.

If you just need a super quick way to strip the formatting from some text or to make a .TXT file without downloading a program, try Edit Pad.

Notepad++

Automatically restores recently opened, unsaved files

Auto-completes as you write

Includes tons of really helpful features like macros, syntax highlighting, and plugins

Opens basically any file as a text document

There’s a portable version available

Runs on Windows only

Notepad++ is an excellent alternative notepad application for Windows computers. It’s really easy to use for beginners who just need a text file opener or editor but also includes some really advanced features.

This program uses tabbed browsing, which means several documents remain open at a time and they’ll display at the top of Notepad++ as tabs. While each tab represents its own file, Notepad++ can interact with all of them at once to do things like compare files for differences and search for or replace text.

Probably the easiest way to edit files with Notepad++ is to right-click the file and choose Edit with Notepad++ from the context menu.

This program can open nearly any file as a text document and supports lots of helpful plugins. It also includes a really handy text search-and-replace function, automatic syntax highlighting, word auto-completion, offline text-file conversion.

The Notepad++ Find option searches for words with criteria like backward direction, match whole word only, match case, and wrap around.

Also supported: bookmarking, macros, auto-backup, multi-page searching, resumed sessions, read-only mode, encoding conversions, searching for words on Wikipedia, and opening the document in your web browser.

Notepad++ also supports plugins to do things like auto-save open documents, merge all the text from open documents into one main file, align programming code, monitor open documents to refresh them as they change, copy and paste more than one item from the clipboard at once, and lots more.

Notepad++ saves text documents to a huge variety of formats like TXT, CSS, ASM, AU3, BASH, BAT, HPP, CC, DIFF, HTML, REG, HEX, JAVA, SQL, and VBS.

Notepad++ works with Windows only, both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. You can also grab a portable version of Notepad++ from the download page; one is in the ZIP format and the other is a 7Z file.

Brackets

Perfect for an uncluttered, minimal working space

Supports split-screen editing

Includes code-specific syntax highlighting

Can view updates for some files live in your web browser

Lets you use keyboard shortcuts

Works on Windows, Linux, and macOS

Plugins are supported to add extra features

Built mainly for people with code development in mind, so most of the features are centered around project files, displaying code, etc.

Brackets is a free text editor that’s primarily meant for web designers, but can of course be used by anyone to view or edit a text document.

The interface is clean and modern and feels really easy to use despite all of its advanced settings. In fact, nearly all of the options are hidden away from plain site so that it’s easy for anyone to use, which also provides an extremely open UI for editing.

Code writers might like that Brackets highlights syntax, can split the screen to edit more than one document simultaneously, lets you click one button for a really simple distraction-free interface, and supports lots of keyboard shortcuts so that you can quickly indent, duplicate, move between lines, toggle line and block comments, show or hide code hints, and more.

You can quickly change the file type you’re working with to instantly change syntax highlighting rules, as well as change the encoding of the file if you need to.

If you’re editing a CSS or HTML file, you can enable the Live Preview option to watch the page update in real time in your web browser as you make changes to the file.

The Working Files area is where you can open all of the files that belong to a single project, and quickly move between them without leaving Brackets.

Some examples of plugins you can use in Brackets include one to support W3C validation, Ungit to make it easier to use Git, an HTML tag menu, and Python tools.

Brackets comes installed with both a dark and a light theme that you can change at any time, but there are dozens of others that you can install through the Extensions Manager.

It’s available as a DEB, MSI, and DMG file for use in Linux, Windows, and macOS, respectively.

Komodo Edit

Very attractive and modern interface

You can make virtual projects to bring together files from various locations

Supports unique features not found in similar text editors

Changing the interface setup is easy with one click

The tabbed interface is easy to work with

Runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows

It’s a bit complex—even with its minimal UI—for people who want just a simple text editor

Komodo Edit is another free text editor with a clear and minimal design that still manages to pack some awesome features.

Various view modes are included so that you can quickly open or close specific windows. One is a focus mode to hide all of the open windows and just display the editor, and the others show or hide things like folders, the syntax checker results, and notifications.

This program simplifies the management of all open text documents. At the very top of the program is the path to the currently opened file, and you can select the arrow next to any folder to get a list of files, any of which will open as a new tab in Komodo Edit if you select it.

The folder views off to the side of Komodo Edit are also really useful since they let you browse through the file system as well as create virtual projects that link folders and files together to better organize what you need to work on.

A unique feature in Komodo Edit is the area at the upper-left side of the program that lets you not only undo and redo like most programs but also go back to the previous cursor location, as well as go forward to return to where you just were.

Here are some other Komodo Edit features worth noting: you can connect to a remote FTP server to open or save files, supports bookmarking specific areas of the document, lets you switch to a huge number of file types to highlight syntax differently and to save under that format, the «Go to Anything» search box lets you search for files to open, install add-ons, run scripts and commands, open menus, install other languages, change the color scheme, etc., recently closed tabs and files are easy to re-open, preview files in a web browser, build templates from existing files, the «Watch File» option can open a document in a new window for reference without being added to the tabbed list of files you’re editing, and it records macros that can be played back to repeat things.

This text editor works with Windows, Mac, and Linux.