What’s Your Favorite Code Editor?
Creating a web application takes long hours of planning, lots of designs iterations and of course, execution — which involves lots of code and countless trips to the coffee machine. Writing code can almost be compared to painting. To create a painting, you need a set of color pallets, paper, brushes and of course, your favorite caffeinated beverage. In that analogy, the brush would be the developer’s code editor. Can you imagine a painter trying to create a piece of art without a brush? — well, yes, you can use your fingers and all, but that’s a topic for another post — That’s the same for us developers. Having in hands the right code editor will definitely improve your productivity, saving you time and a few trips to the coffee machine. Back in the days there weren’t many options of code editors for web developers, with the most popular being FrontPage and Dreamweaver — if you find a website today that has that 90’s look (yes, they are still out there), trust me, it was created using one of these two editors. Fortunately, the web evolved, so did the code editors. Today there are many different options with many different functionalities suited for specific tasks/languages and project complexity. Let me tell you my favorites:
Sublime Text
Build by Jon Skinner, a former Google Software Engineer, Sublime is a beautiful light weight editor with great features. Considered one of the best editors out there, Sublime offers full package control, is easily manageable and its cross platform. Sublime has a built in Python complier, which allows you to experiment your code in real time. Most important, Sublime is loved and supported by a big community, with a repository containing all sorts of packages that can be easily found and installed.
Notepad++
A free source code editor based on the powerful editing component Scintilla, Notepad++ uses pure Win32 API and STL which ensures a higher execution speed and smaller program sizes. Notepad++ supports several languages — including markup languages. It also has support for macros and plugins, but most important, it has support for auto completion — although limited to a few languages — and syntax highlighting and code folding. On top of all that, Notepad++ is also good for the environment! Because of its optimization in execution speed, Notepad++ allows the PC to reduce power consumption, which results in a greener environment — how cool is that?
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
PHP Storm
PHP Storm is a featured packed IDE (Integrated Development Environment) licensed by JetBrains. It has become increasingly popular overs the last couple of years due to its version control system integration, support for remote deployment and support to all major PHP frameworks. Although not free, PHP Storm provides an extreme amount of time savings shortcuts, refactoring tools and advanced syntax-highlighting that is better when compared to the free editors. It also allows developers to quickly navigate through the program flow and to integrate with Git, which by itself makes it worth the cost.
https://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/
Netbeans
Netbeans is also a full packed IDE, recommended especially for professional software development. Although more robust than the other mentioned editors, Netbeans is perfect if you want to have as much control as possible over your project. With Netbeans you can easily create FTP connections, have framework management prior to the project creation, auto-reload pages on browsers upon save, and much more. It’s user friendly interface allows users to quickly interact and share code. Netbeans supports several languages and its free.
TextMate
Created by Allan Odgard, TextMate features declarative customizations, tabs for open documents, recordable macros, folding sections, snippets, shell integration and extensible bundle system. Behind the scenes, TextMate is very well designed and coded. TextMate does all the little details it has cleanly and smoothly. One of the biggest disadvantages — or advantages, depending on how you look at it — is that TextMate is only supported on Macs. So, if you are a PC user and want to use TextMate, I’m sorry but you are out of luck.
At the end of the day, the editor that will fit you better is the one where you feel more comfortable and the one that allows you to be more productive. I personally love Sublime Text and use it extensively on most of my projects. When trying to decide which one is the best for you, you should just install it and give it a go, playing a bit with the different features and sticking with the one that is more applicable to the kind of project you are working on. Just like paintings, the end result and quality of your web app will depend much more on your ability to code than on the code editor of your choice, but having a good editor will definitely make the creation experience much more pleasant. If you have a favorite code editor other than the ones I mentioned, comment it below, I’m always on the lookout for the next cool thing.
