Text-editors. Let’s talk text-editors. A good text-editor is like the revolver a cowboy carries. It’s unique to them. They understand how their revolver feels, how fast they can draw it, they know its weight, if a cowboy and a revolver just CLICK, then all is right with the world.

We’re all cowboys, right? Keyboard cowboys, I suppose. Either way, regardless of the skill and experience of a web developer, they typically (and by typically I mean ‘always’) have strong opinions about their text editors. Now I’m not about to sit up here and bore you with what I use and why I use it, instead I’m just gonna supply you with a few options and you can scope ‘em out for yourself!

These are all open source projects, so they see updates pretty often

Notepad++

I’ve used Notepad++ for years. Notepad++ is probably the definitive KISS (keep it simple, stupid) text editor. It’s optimized for windows environments, so it has an incredibly small processing footprint. It includes syntax highlighting as well as a plugin system. I never really used the plugins much at all, but there are a lot of them. With the right ones, I’m sure you could turn your text editing workflow into something fierce!

It’s also worth noting that there’s a style configurator if you’re worried about all your syntax looking boring. I’m not sure why I love changing my syntax color, but it gives my development environment a nice personal touch.

Sublime Text 2

Sublime Text is more of a product family, but the most recent stable release is Sublime Text 2. I’ve been using it a lot recently, and it blows my mind. It’s a bit of a perfect marriage between a notepad with impressive control and a series of simple key commands that mean you can get editing a lot faster. Sublime text has the option of installing a ‘package manager’, which, in many ways is the same system as Notepad++’s plugin system, although I believe ST2 has a more supported community developing packages for it.

Sublime Text 2 also offers a multiple cursor system. It’s basically a feature in which you can place more than one cursor on the text editor and edit in many places at once. It’s a text editor pretty much designed to make your coding more efficient, faster, and less copy-pasteful

Brackets

Brackets is another text editor that probably comes closer in nature to Sublime Text 2 mentioned above, what’s really interesting about it is that it’s written entirely in javascript.

Brackets, at first, was really cool to me. For some, it still is a VERY cool project that’s actually found a home at Adobe. It comes in two forms: The open source version that’s free to download, and the premium version you can get through Adobe’s Creative Cloud (called Edge Code).

Brackets has a lot of the same features as the other two text editors, but I feel like it really shines with the whole ‘live preview’ feature. That’s right, Brackets allows you to connect the program with a web browser, and every time you change your HTML or CSS, the web view is updated to reflect that change. In a way, Brackets is trying to make the workflow of looking at your changes far less redundant. It’s really useful and there’s just an incredibly satisfying feeling you get from watching your changes occur instantly.

Anyways…

Whichever text editor you use is TOTALLY fine. We all have our preferences, but I just wanted to share some of my experiences with the text editors I’ve been using. Find a text editor you like, find on that makes you feel like you’re working at your most efficient. Go forth, and write GORGEOUS code!

Happy coding!