Starter Apps for Wannabe Coders
In general, you can code just with a simple plain text editor. But, there are some great apps that can help on the productivity and make your working environment more beautiful.
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First of all, I’m also a wannabe web coder, as I think everyone else who try to learn to code without the IT background is. It’s far from a problem, but sometimes, some people get angry to be named that way.
So, when I first tried to write some lines of code, in HTML, I had to figure out what were the best (or the “simple ones” for beginners) apps for this purpose. In my case, on a Mac. With Google, this is a very common task nowadays, but I hadn’t someone to advise me about an specific app. That’s what I decided to do here.
But the point is: though we have amazing and elegant apps to code, since everything we do gets better with training, you have to practice every single day, no matter how hard or confusing it can be in the beginning. Nor the app you are using. In fact, you can use any simple text editor, but there are some minor differences between them.
That said, here you have my list of favorite (I have tried several of them so far) apps to code on a Mac, Windows or Chrome OS:
/* Mac OSX */
Sublime Text 3
For me, it’s the best text/code editor for Mac. It has an attractive user interface and advanced features, making it the most complete for the task, but it’s a paid app. The “distraction free mode”, a full screen mode that focuses on just your text on the screen and nothing else, is great for keeping you concentrated on your lines of code.
TextMate 3
A plain and simple user interface. I love the app’s style, it’s very straightforward for the use (there’s no “learning curve”), where I typed my first lines of code for training!
iA Writer
My preferred text editor, though is not necessarily only to write code. It’s a beautiful Mac/iOS app with a huge open white space, i.e., a “distraction free mode”, where you can elegantly type HTML/CSS codes. It’s also possible to write using Markdown.
Byword
It’s a nice and modern text editor, also available for iOS. You can use Markdown, sync between devices with iCloud and Dropbox and even export the text in various formats. The only annoying thing for me in this app is the “greyish” empty screen for writing.
- I’ve also tried: TextWrangler and Brackets
- You can also take a look at: Coda 2
/* Chrome OS */
Text
A simple and minimal text editor for Chrome OS (and the Chrome browser). It’s fast, works offline, has syntax highlighting and syncs with Google Drive. It’s surprinsingly well built and works very well.
Caret
More robust than the last one, it’s a full-featured code editor which also works offline. In summary, it’s like a “Sublime Text” for Chrome OS!
/* Windows */
I stopped using Windows machines in the late 2011. At that time, I unfortunately never tried to code… Rumor has it you can code on the Notepad.
- You can also take a look at: Notepad++
