Define your environment. Develop with performance. Deliver your code.
Every developer, coder, code ninja, syntax genius, PHP princess…you get it…has their favorite IDE or development environment where they sling their code and write masterpieces. As developers, it’s ever-present that we need to stay on top of our craft. We’re on a non-stop quest to find snippets of code, learning how to use the newest javascript library and of course always giving back to our community of fellow developers through forums and sharing code (at least you should be). I recently went on an IDE search, and I’ve compiled a list of my favorites. They are all free except for one.
1. Atom.io: Atom is a text editor that's modern, approachable, yet hackable to the core—a tool you can customize to do anything but also use productively without ever touching a config file.
Key features include:
- Free and open source on all platforms
- Integration with Git and GitHub
- A well-documented open API for plugin developers
- Immediately usable with less reliance on configuration files
- A good selection of themes and plugins with a built-in package manager
- Sublime Text and vim-compatible shortcuts
- Attractive interface
Cost: Free
2. Sublime Text: Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor for code, markup, and prose.
You'll love the slick user interface, extraordinary features, and amazing performance.
Key features include:
- comprehensive language support with TextMate-compatible grammars
- multiple selections and column editing
- “Goto Anything” quick navigation to locate files and code
- a command palette to access all features
- a mini-map and code snippets
- extensive customization, great themes, and numerous plugins
- good-looking, fast and stable
Cost: $70
3. Brackets: With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, Brackets is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser. Try Creative Cloud Extract (preview) for Brackets for an easy way to get clean, minimal CSS straight from a PSD with no generated code.
Key features include:
- Free and open source on all platforms
- Good language and linting support especially for web development
- Live browser preview and updates without a server (requires Chrome)
- Inline CSS editing
- A well-documented open API for plugin developers
- Immediately usable with less reliance on configuration files
- A good selection of themes and plugins with a built-in package manager
- Multiple selection editing, auto-complete and color picker
- Attractive interface
Cost: Free
4. Light Table: Light Table is a crowd-funded Kickstarter campaign that raised more than $300,000 for Chris Granger & Robert Attorri to develop the open source editor in ClojureScript with a Node-Webkit wrapper.
Key features include:
- Free and open source on all platforms
- Lightweight installation
- Good-looking, fast minimalist interface
- Auto-complete everywhere
- Inline evaluation and watches
- Split views and instant feedback
- A command palette and fuzzy finder
- A good selection of themes provided
- A plugin manager with a reasonable selection extensions and an open API coming soon
- Application auto-update
Cost: Free
5. Zed: Zed is a fully offline-capable, open source, keyboard-focused, text and code editor for power users. You can use Zed to edit local files as well as remote files on any server. Zed has all features you'd expect from a capable code editor.
Key features include:
- Syntax highlighting for many programming languages (e.g. C, Clojure, CoffeeScript, C#, CSS, Dart, Erlang, Go, Haml, Haskell, HTML, ini files, Java, JavaScript, JSON, LogiQL, Lua, Markdown, Nix, PHP, Plist, Protobufs, Python, Ruby, Shell, XML)
- Code completion: symbols, snippets, and property/method completion.
- Built-in linting for some languages with inline markers (JavaScript, CoffeeScript, JSON, Lua, CSS)
- Multiple cursors
- Split-view editing
- Themes: light and dark themes out of the box and you can easily develop your own using CSS.
Cost: Free
