Diane Garcia

As time goes by, the variety of text editors available for the use of web developers keep on increasing. It is always that the new one has something better or something new to offer. Good thing that due to the number of choices they have, they could weigh which one would be most appropriate for their project.

Here are the most used text editors by web developers:

Notepad

Notepad is the most popular text editor based on the survey. It does not support any format or styles, which makes it very suitable in a DOS environment. It is one of the most favorites because it recognizes both left to right and right to left languages. It also does macro-recording and playback for repetitive keystrokes, a powerful regular expression search-and-replace, and support for many programming languages. Although you can edit file using notepad no matter what the format is, it does not read UNIX or MAC-style text files accurately.

Textmate

Textmate is a GUI text editor for MAC OS X. It is commonly used for screenwriting. Programmers prefer Textmate because it features declarative customizations, tabs for open documents, recordable macros, folding sections and snippets, shell integration, and an extensible bundle system. On the other hand, it does not support variable-width or wide fonts, right-to-left languages, (S)FTP, split views and textmate tends to work slower when composed with large files or long lines. Developers must also be online to be able to validate their website because only W3C validator can be used for HTML validation.

Coda

Coda was specifically developed for MAC OS X. It was created to resolve the problem of inadequacy of full-featured website development platforms corresponding to application development platform Xcode. One of its notable feature is that it boasts a new Find/Replace mechanism. It benefits the users because they were able to do complex replaces using a method similar to regular expressions. It also supports bookamarks, which are the specially-formatted comment tags in many syntaxes. With the use of bookmarks, developers can go to the corresponding line of text from anywhere in the editor by clicking on the link in the Code Navigator.

Vim

Vim is compatible with Windows, Linux and MAC OS. It is based on commands given in a text-user interface. The command line mode is where its full functionality takes place. Some considers it as a programmer's best friend because it is very convenient to use and it is very extensible. Programmers are not the only ones who benefit from this text editor, but also the children of Uganda. Although Vim is free and open source software, its license has charityware clasuses.

PSPad

PSPad is a freeware text editor for Windows. It supports syntax highlighting and hex editing, and is designed as a universal GUI for editing many languages including PHP, Perl, HTML, and Java, autocompletion, tabs, FTP client and find/replace using regular expressions. It also has a feature where you can save sessions to be able to go back to your previous set. up.

When choosing the proper text editor to use for your project, it shouldn't depend on the popularity of the program. It will all boil down to the usability and functionality of the product.

The author writes articles, tips and advice for WickedInnovations offer web design and affordable web development services.