Aug 23, 2017 · 2 min read
Best Code Editor for Front End Development
Some of the code Editors available for Front End Development are Atom, IntelliJ IDEA, Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, NotePad++
Here’s a brief description of each editor and which will be the right fit for your project -
- Atom is available for Windows, MacOS as well as Linux. You can install a whole lot of plugins for Code Beautify, Themes, Auto Close, JS Hint tags and so on. It is a good editor but one drawback of it is that it hangs a lot, even on a MacBook with 16 GB of RAM. This is out of my personal experience.
- Sublime Text and Notepad++ are good editors. They are very lightweight and would be preferable for small scale projects with a few files. Sublime and NotePad++ also have support for installing additional plugins. You can also edit multiple lines at once in Sublime Text.
- IntelliJ is a great tool for Front End Developers. It has a built in terminal. It works great with GIT. It has a couple of themes and the best part about it is that you can see each GIT file history in it integrated into the Tool. That’s a great feature for developers to see which was the last commit added to each file with the differences. The community edition is available for free on the official website. However, the ultimate edition is not free. You can try the ultimate edition, they provide you a free trial. There’s another tool called WebStorm which is also developed by JetBrains (the same company which developed IntelliJ). You can try it too. I haven’t used it.
- Visual Studio Code is a great Editor developed by Microsoft. It has an in built Console, terminal, debugger. It also provides the ability for the developer to debug on the editor itself. Just like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, you can setup a breakpoint on any like and start debugging just like how you do it on any browser. You can even step into functions or step over functions and add watchers and check the call stack. If you’re used to using any other editor like Atom or IntelliJ IDEA, you can install the keymap extensions for it and all the Keyboard shortcuts of that editor will be available on VS Code. You can also install a bunch of themes. The default themes of VS code have a high contrast, so you can install the Atom theme if you are used to working on Atom before and start working. It also provides support for other languages like Python, Java, TypeScript etc.
Hence, my personal recommendation would be Visual Studio Code or IntelliJ IDEA. You can try anyone which pleases you.
Disclaimer— All views expressed here are personal and based out of personal experience.
Cheers!