Top 5 Free Text Editors

Choosing a text editor for programming and developing is a big deal, especially if you are a beginner. In this article we have collected the top 5 free text editors for programmers and developer’s.

Best Free Text Editors are

• Visual Studio Code
• Atom
• Brackets
• Notepad++
• Sublime Text

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a lightweight and it is a powerful source code editor which runs on your desktop and is available for Windows, macOS and Linux. Visual Studio Code is a completely free to use. It is incredibly fast and intuitive, it has a built in Tabbed Terminal. It has built in Emmet which allows you to use shortcuts to write HTML and CSS quickly. It provides built-in Git commands.

Emmet is available for almost all text editors as some sort of plugin or extension but in Visual Studio Code Emmet comes built in. Visual Studio Code is great for almost many languages like C++, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, asp.net, and it goes on. It has a powerful debugger with some extra tools that almost make it a borderline IDE without the performance constraints of IDE.

It have easy peer sharing which allows you to connect and work with other people in your editor remotely. GitHub, .NET Core, Windows, and Anaconda are some of the popular tools that integrate with Visual Studio Code.

Pros

• Easy to use.
• Powerful multi-language IDE.
• Support TypeScript IntelliSense.
• Console terminal integration.
• Software memory consumption is low.

Atom

Atom was launched in 2014 and it was developed by GitHub. Atom is a free and open-source text and source code editor for Linux, macOS and Windows. Atom is one of the easiest and the most intuitive text editor. Atom allows us to customize fully with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Customization and settings are easy to change and there’s also a phenomenal package manager to extend atom. Much like WordPress there’s a community of developers who contribute themes and plugins for Atom. It support for plugins written in Node.js and embedded Git Control which was developed by GitHub.

It has pair coding working with teams. It has built-in GitHub integration to increase workflow. Atom has smart autocompletion. Atom is also compatible with scores of programming languages that include C, C++, Python, HTML, Java, JavaScript, JSON, PHP, and many more. Its developers call it a Hackable text editor for the 21st century.

Pros

• Atom has multiple panes for comparing and editing code side by side.
• Git integration.
• Helpful community of people on the forums to ask for help.
• Built-in package manager.
• FTP integration.

Brackets

Brackets is a cross platform text editor which was developed by Adobe Systems and it was launched in 2014. Brackets is mainly designed for web front-end developers and designers. It has a simple interface and has great syntax highlighting and color coded tags and attributes in HTML. Brackets is affiliate with Adobe Photoshop so we can take a piece of PSD file and generate code for our project.

It has a live preview feature which allows you to open your HTML files on localhost. Brackets will automatically refresh the browser and load the latest saved file. Developers can upload their own extensions through GitHub. It is written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

There are different themes available in brackets. It allows users to personalize and alter features for their own needs. Brackets is currently maintained on GitHub by Adobe and other open-source developers. Brackets is not only used for developing web-based applications but also it is used for writing software codes in various supported languages like Java, C/C++, Python, Groovy, etc.

Pros

• Live preview is best feature of the Brackets.
• Simple interface.
• Fast and easy setup.
• Code auto-completion.
• Easily switch between the tabs or pages.

Notepad++

Notepad++ was developed by Don Ho and was launched in 2003. Notepad++ is a lightweight application. It allows us to collapse different blocks of code which makes it easier to navigate the program. It is completely customizable. It use less computer power than the average text editor. We can save text document in different formats such as txt, java, sql, bat, bash, html, py, xml, css, etc.

It support multiple documents open at a time in different tabs and also it supports tabbed editing. Notepad++ allows us to translate it into our native language, it is translated into over 80 languages. It automatically restores unsaved and recently opened files. It has a flexible plugins and there are more than 100 compatible plugins are available.

Notepad++ has the powerful editing components. It runs on Microsoft windows. Notepad++ provides a list of plugins to improve the functionality of the text editor and to integrate with other programs. It supports almost 80 programming languages like C, C++, Java, HTML, CSS, PHP, Python, SQL, etc.

Pros

• It has a very comprehensive find / replace function.
• We can change the interface color and the text color.
• Document Map and Multiple Cursors.
• Easy directory management.
• Lots of plugins available.

Sublime Text

Sublime text was developed by Jon Skinner an Will Bond and was published in 2008. Sublime Text editor is free but there is a commercial license available but the free version will give you all the capabilities of the commercial. It is faster and it is completely responsive. It has extremely powerful shortcuts for finding and modifying multiple lines.

Command palette holds frequently used functionality like changing syntax, sorting, changing indentation. It has a powerful API and package ecosystem. It is written in C++ and Python.

Sublime text uses Python API, that allows plugins. Using command palette we can install thousand of packages which is built by the Sublime text community. It supports languages like ASP, C, C++, C#, CSS, HTML, Python, AppleScript, Java, PHP, Ruby, XML, etc.

Pros

• Manipulating text is easy and efficient.
• Text highlights.
• Accurate syntax suggestions.
• Low memory usage.
• Easy to use