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May 7, 2008
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35 Useful Source Code Editors Reviewed

Coding ( 587 articles )
Tools ( 173 articles )
Editors ( 3 articles )
Subversion ( 2 articles )
Software ( 10 articles )
Open Source ( 12 articles )
Reviews ( 5 articles )

Quick Summary

To edit HTML- and CSS-code you only need a simple plaintext-editor — the rest depends on your skills and your creativity. However, to make your life a little bit easier, you can use some more comfortable source-code editors with advanced editing features. These features can effectively support you during coding, debugging and testing. Powerful modern editors provide developers with syntax highlighting, diff, macros, plugins, code-snippets, preview-option and an integrated FTP-management tool. Some editors go even further and offer a complete integrated development environment with numerous features and functions.

In the list below we present an overview of 35 established or rather unknown — but useful source code-editors; you’ll probably find “usual suspects” — your favourite editor or the editor you’ve once been working with. But you’ll also find some rather unknown alternatives which are definitely worth considering when choosing an optimal source code editor.

Some of the “ancient” text-editors such as EMacs or Vi are still alive and have achieved a remarkable level of quality over years. We’ve presented them below proving that sometimes it is really better to consider preferring a rather old editor to a “fresh” one. The position of the editors in the list is rather random and doesn’t necessarily correspond to our personal evaluation of the editors. Please notice: even although this overview presents quite many editors, it doesn’t mention all of them.

Yesterday we’ve published a review of 20 WYSIWYG-editors. Now, what about useful source code editors? What is your favourite?

SubEthaEdit

Subethaedit (Mac) SubEthaEdit is rather unknown, but a very powerful and lean text editor. What makes the editor different is its primary focus on collaborative web development. For instance, when using the editor you can see live what changes the other developers have introduced — in their or in your documents. When a source code file in your project has been changed, the tool notifies you immediately in the main window.

The editor includes advanced editing features such as a UNIX command line utility to enable complex and interactive pipe workflows with your terminal, completely user customizable syntax highlighting through styles, support for editing files as administrator. Improved AppleScript support to allow control of sharing features is also available. A definitive choice for collaborative coding process. Price: $29. A 30-days trial version is available.

Some of Subethaedit’s features:

Share documents with Bonjour
Collaborating
AppleScript menu and manipulate text with AppleScript
Safari-powered live-updating HTML preview
Autocompletion
Splitview
Integrates with FTP clients as external editor
Customizable syntax highlighting

Panic Coda (Mac OS), a web development software rather than a source code editor, incorporates a licensed version of the SubEthaEdit engine, rather than having a custom one, to allow for sharing of documents over the Bonjour network. Coda also boasts a new Find/Replace mechanism, which allows users to do complex replaces using a method similar to regular expressions.

UltraEdit

Ultraedit (Win) UltraEdit is probably the most advanced and therefore not lightweight text editor. It is a plaintext, HTML and HEX editor and an advanced PHP, Perl, Java and JavaScript editor for programmers. Compared to other editors, Ultraedit also include regex capabilities, keyboard shortcuts, environment and workspace support, code folding, macros, SSH/Telnet, multiline find and replace and unicode support.

UltraEdit supports disk-based 64-bit file handling (standard) on all 32-bit Windows platforms. A very popular editor which is now released in its version 14. Ultraedit costs $49.95. If you are looking for a web-development focused editor with numerous advanced features Ultraedit is the first option to consider.

Some of Ultraedit’s features:

Code Folding
Unicode support
Disk based text editing and large file handling - supports files in excess of 4GB, minimum RAM used even for multi-megabyte files
Mulitline find and replace dialogs for all searches (Find, Replace, Find in Files, Replace in Files)
100,000 word spell checker, with foreign languages support (American English, British English, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish and Swedish)
Syntax highlighting — configurable, pre-configured for C/C++, VB, HTML, Java, and Perl, with special options for FORTRAN and LaTex. Multiple word-libraries are available for free download.
FTP client built in to give access to FTP servers with multiple account settings and automatic logon and save. (32-Bit Only) Includes support for SFTP (SSH2)
SSH/Telnet window
Project/workspace support
Environment Selector - Provides predefined or user-created editing “environments” that remember the state of all of UltraEdit’s dockable windows, toolbars and more for user convenience.
Integrated scripting language to automate tasks
Configurable keyboard mapping
Hexadecimal editor allows editing of any binary file, shows binary and ASCII view
Named templates
HTML toolbar preconfigured for popular HTML functions

Komodo Edit

Komodo Edit (cross-platform) Komodo Edit is an open-source scripting environment which was developed for programmers who need a multi-language editor with broad functionality, but not the features of an IDE, like debugging, DOM viewer, interactive shells, and source code control integration. The editor includes a full range of supported languages (Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl) and platforms (Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows ). Like Komodo IDE, Komodo Edit also supports browser-side languages like JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and XML.

Considering that Komodo Edit is free and offers functionalities which aren’t available in commercial products, it is a very impressive professional editor for dynamic languages and definitely worth checking out. You may want to consider Komodo IDE (price: $295) which is a multi-platform, multi-language development environment for end-to-end dynamic web application development.

Some of Komodo Edit’s features:

support for all major scripting languages
in-depth autocomplete and calltips
multi-language file support
syntax coloring and syntax checking
Vi emulation
Emacs key bindings
code snippets and code folding
project manager
XPI Extensions support provides the same capability as Firefox, with all standard Mozilla APIs
multi-user support and many more.

Eclipse

Eclipse (Java / cross-platform) Eclipse is an open-source Java-based integrated development environment (IDE). Originally, Eclipse was meant to be used by Java developers, however, since users can extend its capabilities by installing numerous plug-ins, Eclipse is widely used by professional developers of all kind. For instance, plug-ins for C and C++ (CDT-project), Perl, PHP, ColdFusion, Ruby, Python and C# are available.

In Eclipse you will definitely find all features you would expect from a professional source sode editor. However, you will also find much more. Additionally, among nifty features of the IDE are advanced code completion, refactoring, content assist and parameter hints, snippets, advanced search, faster navigation, synchronization with CVS, actions saver (you can assign actions performed on a file each time its saved), advanced compare view, definition of team-wide settings for code clean ups (Clean Up profile), a Quick Fix assistant and many-many more. And to get the ultimate productivity boost, check out the Mylyn extension. Eclipse is a very powerful and flexible solution which should definitely be considered by professional developers.

TextMate

TextMate (Power PC / Intel Mac) TextMate is a high-end source code editor for Mac OS which looks damn sexy. Its integration of version control systems, recordable macros, regular expression search and replace (grep) and shell integration combine most useful features in one single interface.

What is distinctive for TextMate is the integration of scope selectors: a scope selector is a pattern much like a CSS selector which is matched against the scope of the caret (i.e. current context) and the outcome is either a match or a non-match. There are also powerful macros and downloadable bundles available.

Some of TextMate’s features:

Ability to Search and Replace in a Project
Clipboard History
Completion of Words from Current Document
CSS-like Selectors to Pinpoint the Scope of Actions and Settings
Dynamic Outline for Working With Multiple Files
File Tabs when Working With Projects
Foldable Code Blocks
Plug-able Through Your Favorite Scripting Language
Recordable Macros With No Programming Required
Run Shell Commands from Within a Document
Support for Darcs, Perforce, SVK, and Subversion
Support for More Than 50 Languages (incl. LaTeX integration)
Switch Between Files in Projects With a Minimum of Key Strokes
Themable Syntax Highlight Colors
Visual Bookmarks to Jump Between Places in a File

HTML-Kit

HTML-Kit (Win) HTML-Kit is a freeware full-featured editor designed to help HTML, XHTML and XML authors to edit, format, lookup help, validate, preview and publish web pages. Despite its name and the light download size, HTML-Kit is a multi-purpose tool that has support for several scripting and programming languages.

Features: macros, hotkeys, batch search and replace, wrapping selected text with snippets, auto/manual block indenting, auto backup files by appending a new extension or by making a copy in another folder, autosave, multiple methods of previewing, bookmarks, multi-line search and replace and more. Due to its features suite, HTML-Kit may be considered as a serious free alternative to Ultraedit.

Some of HTML-Kit’s features:

more than 400 free plugins available for customizing and extending HTML-Kit (including ASP, CF, C#, iHTML, Java, JavaScript, JSP, Perl, PHP, Python, SQL etc.).
multiple live preview modes
code snippets
Validate HTML, XML and CSS
Actions Bar
Integrate with Windows shell
batch actions
HTML Tidy
auto backup and auto save
TimeTracker
Text to Speech Wizard
UnicodePad
FTP Workspace

Scriptly

Scriptly (Win) Scriptly is an extensive, almost overloaded freeware-code-editor for coding in HTML and PHP. The editor offers 7 styles of syntax highlighting, code completion, code consistency check, code inspector, tree view of the source code for HTML, PHP and CSS, browser preview in IE and Firefox, print preview and image editing.

Hex-viewer, diff viewer, multi-file search and replace, table-assistant and MySQL-assistant are available as well. Developers can also set hotkeys, use code snippets and employ the project management tool, including to-do-notes. Hence developers get almost everything they might ever need — for free. A really powerful freeware alternative to commercial products.

BBEdit

BBEdit (PowerPC and Intel Macs) Like Ultraedit for Windows, BBEdit is one of the well-known professional source code-editors for Mac-users. The editor was created with focus on web-authors and software-developers. Among interesting features of BBEdit are text factories which allow to automate repetitive text-processing tasks and Preview Server support you can use to preview pages which use PHP, JSP, or other server-side processing techniques.

Apart from that, file comparison, enhanced source control management (integrated support for the Subversion and Perforce allows to work with multiple repositories) and extensible syntax coloring support available. BBEdit costs $125. If you are using Mac, BBEdit is definitely a good option to consider. There is a 30-days trial version available.

Some of BBEdit’s features:

Automator support
Transparently reads and writes gzip (.gz) files
Transparently reads and writes DOS, Unix, and Mac files
Splittable editing windows
Automated auto-save
Extensive FTP and SFTP support
Run Unix scripts and filters
Native Mac OS X spelling checker
Comprehensive AppleScript support: scriptable, recordable, and attachable

Screem

Screem (Linux) Screem is a web development environment for HTML/XML-documents. It’s purpose is to increase productivity when constructing a site, by providing quick access to commonly used features. While it is written for use with the GNOME desktop environment in mind it does not specifically require you to be running it, just have the libraries installed.

Screem has some nifty features such as advanced CVS support, broken link checking, intelligent code completion and support for regular expression. You can also copy some content from a web browser and have the html that was selected pasted, rather than just the text. The latest version was released in 2005, but it’s still worth considering when using Linux.

Some of Screem’s features:

Broken Link Checking
CTags Support
CVS Support
Document Structure Display
Helper Applications
Inline Tagging
Page Previewing
Page Templates
Spell Checking
Syntax Highlighting
Wizards

CSSEdit

CSSEdit (Mac) While most editors presented in this overview are (X)HTML- or PHP-oriented, CSSEdit focuses on CSS, offering a solid foundation for standards-based web-designs. Among other things, CSSEdit offers real-time styling: even when your dynamic Web App is powered by a complex database or makes use of AJAX, you can style and analyze it without the hassle of uploading or refreshing.

The editor also uses intelligent CodeSense, so instead of suggesting a list of predefined keywords, it actually analyzes your Style Sheet and behavior to offer smart, context-sensitive suggestions. A fresh, nice-looking, intuitive and powerful application for editing stylesheets. Price: 29.95 €.

Some of CSSEdit’s features:

live preview
Selector Builder lets you describe what elements to style in plain English.
elegant visual interface
intelligent source editing
X-ray Inspector shows you what styles apply to the web page
Validation Inspector lets you validate your style sheets against W3C standards
Milestones integration

Arachnophilia

Arachnophilia (Java / all) Arachnophilia is a freeware Java-based legacy editor which was first released in the mid 90s. The tool is a powerful programming editor with some special HTML production and editing features. The editor has RegExp functions and the text compare functionality. It doesn’t offer something revolutionary, but it is cross-plattform. The last version 5.3 was released in March 2008.

Some of Arachnophilia’s features:

HTML Validate will help you find and correct structural errors in your pages
Code Beautifier
Spell Checker
Advanced FTP Operations

CoffeeCup HTML Editor

CoffeeCup (Win) This editor was first released in 1996 and was regularly updated since then. The last version offers decent HTML & CSS code completion, document dependency check and 40 bullet proof CSS/XHTML layouts. The built-in WYSIWYG-editor should be avoided as it is quite quirky and doesn’t produce meaningful code. The editor itself, however, is focused on producing clean and valid markup. Powerful, but no amazing. Price: $49. A trial-version is available (Nagware).

Some of Coffeecup’s features:

HTML & CSS Code Completion
Quick Tag Help
Project Management
Graphics Collections
Wizards
Built-in SiteMapperCreator

Smultron

Smultron (Mac) Smultron is a free text editor for Mac OS X Leopard 10 with useful features one won’t find in any alternative — even commercial — products. E.g. if you don’t want to be disturbed by other applications or the desktop you can let Smultron cover the whole screen to let you concentrate on your work. You can preview HTML-files directly in Smultron and save snippets of text and insert them with a shortcut.

Smultron can also use regular expressions and it can run commands and scripts. It can be used for a whole variety of needs — particularly, for web programming or script editing. Intuitive and powerful.

Some of Smultrons features:

split window
snippets
AppleScript support (limited)
support for the ODB Editor Suite
auto-completion
command-line utility

EditPlus

EditPlus (Win) EditPlus is a lightweight text editor, HTML editor and source code editor for Windows. It can serve as a good Notepad replacement, but it also offers many powerful features for Web page authors and programmers. A distinctive feature of EditPlus is its support for user-defined tools, help files and keystroke recording files. The output of tool execution can be captured in the Output Window, so that you can double-click the error line to automatically load the file and locate the cursor to that line.

Among other things you can also use multi-line regex-based find & replace, auto indentation, code folding, compiler integration, shell integration and an integrated web browser. The last version was released in April 2008. Price: $35. There is also an evaluation version available.

Some of EditPlus’ features:

integrated Web browser for previewing
Ruler
Auto-completion
Powerful search and replace
Multiple undo/redo
Spell checker
Customizable keyboard shortcuts

EmEditor

EmEditor (Win) EmEditorText Editor is a lightweight yet extendable and simple text editor for Windows. Compared to other editors, it is very quick, highly customizable and portable. E.g. you can easily set up a removable USB drive to copy project and configuration files to a new machine. A useful feature of EmEditor is its ability to record and play keystrokes and mouse operation against other applications. This capability allows you to automate certain tasks, e.g. when testing your applications.

The Shell Object is used to send keystroke and mouse activities and to enumerate or find top-level windows. Furthermore, the editor supports Unicode and macros. EmEditor is certified for Windows Vista and can quickly open huge files — up to 248 GB or 2.1 billion lines — with only a little memory. Price: $39.99.

PageSpinner

PageSpinner (Mac) PageSpinner is an easy-to-use, professional web page editor for Mac OS which supports HTML, XHTML, PHP, SSI, CSS with a built-in JavaScript generator. Among other features PageSpinner has a built-in FTP support, customizable syntax color-coding of JavaScript, PHP, Cascading Style Sheets and the integration with Apache and the Terminal in OS X.

PageSpinner also supports Include files that enable you to change common sections on all pages in a folder or a site, by simply editing a single include file. Price: $29.95. The editor can be used for free 21 days.

Some of PageSpinner’s features:

built-in FTP support
customizable syntax color-coding
support for Server Side Includes,
integration with Apache and the Terminal in OS X
Fully customizable Live previews
HTML validation
A Tag Clipboard
AppleScript support

HateML Pro

HateML Pro (Win) HateML Pro is a lightweight freeware editor and a powerful PHP IDE with support for (X)HTML and CSS for both professional and novice users alike. It was designed with focus on helping to accelerate the process of editing and debugging web applications, php scripts and XHTML sites. The editor offers a standard suite for efficient web-development: automatic syntax checker, intelligent code-completion tool (IntelliSense & CodeHint), PHP debugger, built-in FTP-client, MySQL Manager and an integrated preview.

Some of HateML Pro’s features:

Advanced Syntax Highlighting
Automatic syntax checker
IntelliSense & CodeHint
Debugger & Profiler
CodeBrowser
FTP Client
MySQL Manager (plugin)

Emacs

Emacs (22 operating systems, among them Linux, Mac OS X and Windows) Emacs (Editor MACroS) is the classic and legacy editing application among Linux-editors. It is the oldest (1976) and the most authoritative editor presented in this overview. There is a large number of extensions that add further functionalities, including a project planner, mail and news reader, debugger interface, calendar, and more.

The editor is popular for its built-in macros and powerful keyboard shortcuts that make editing text documents very efficient. However, you need to climb the learning curve which is quite time-consuming and isn’t easy to achieve for beginners. You can also consider GNU Emacs and XEmacs which are both advanced, open source and cross plattform versions of EMacs. Emacs is freeware and is released under GNU-License. An advanced option for hardcore-programmers.

Some of Emacs’ features:

Many Languages
Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users.
Highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical customization interface.
Content-sensitive editing modes

Notepad++

Notepad++ (Win) A free, mature source code editor and Notepad replacement, which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment. The editor can be considered as an advanced yet simple text-editor which is extremely customizable and offers most functionalities which are available in high-end commercial products. Alternative: Notepad 2.

Some of Notepad++’s features:

Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding
User Defined Syntax Highlighting
Auto-completion
Multi-Document
Regular Expression Search/Replace supported
Full Drag’n’ Drop supported
Zoom in and zoom out
Multi-Language environment supported
Macro recording and playback

NoteTab

NoteTab (Win) NoteTab is a mature text and HTML editor which has been first released in 1998. This application does it all: it can handle a stack of huge files; it has advanced formatting features, offers multi-line global replacements and corrects your spelling mistakes. There are 3 versions of NoteTab. If you are going to use NoteTab, it’s reasonable to only use the Pro Version which costs $29,95.

Some of NoteTab’s (Pro Version) features:

Open and edit many documents at once
Multi-level undo/redo
Very fast text processing
Highlights URLs and HTML tags
Supports document templates
Multilingual spell checker and thesaurus
Supports regular expression search/replace
Programmable - add your own features

PSPad

PSPad (Win) PSPad is another freeware source code editor which should be in every review of professional editing applications. As a web authoring editor, PSPad contains syntax highlighting, macros, clip files and templates. Integrated HEX Editor, Project support, FTP Client, Macro Recorder, File Search/Replace, Code Explorer, Code page conversion are available as well. PSPad a;sp catches and parses compiler output, and can compare different source code versions. PSPad is Freeware.

Some of PSPad’s features:

work with several documents at the same time (MDI)
FTP client - edit files directly from the web
macro recorder to record, save and load macros
text difference with color-coded differences highlighted
templates (HTML tags, scripts, code templates…)
installation contains templates for HTML, PHP, Pascal, JScript, VBScript, MySQL, MS-Dos, Perl,…
syntax highlighting according to file type
user-defined highlighters for exotic environments
auto correction
intelligent internal HTML preview using IE and Mozilla
full HEX editor
external compiler with output catcher, log window and log parser for an “IDE” effect in every environment
integrated TiDy library for formatting and checking HTML code, conversion to CSS, XML, XHTML
export with highlight to RTF, HTML, TeX format to file or clipboard
reformat and compress HTML code, tag character case change
Code explorer for Pascal, C/C++, INI, HTML, XML, PHP and more in development
spell checker
internal web browser with APACHE support

jEdit

jEdit (Java / all) jEdit is, together with Arachnophilia, another cross-platfrom source text editor for professional coding. The editor supports over 130 file types. The current line is highlighted; the source text is divided into blocks such that the beginning and the end of braces are directly visible. Copy-Paste-friends have an unlimited number of clipboards. You can split windows in multiple viewing modes and save the configuration for further projects. jEdit is free — it is released under GPL 2.0 license. Very powerful, however not that easy to get used to first.

Some of jEdit’s features:

Built-in macro language; extensible plugin architecture. Dozens of macros and plugins available.
Plugins can be downloaded and installed from within jEdit using the “plugin manager” feature.
Auto indent, and syntax highlighting for more than 130 languages.
Supports a large number of character encodings including UTF8 and Unicode.
Folding for selectively hiding regions of text.
Word wrap.

Quanta Plus

Quanta Plus (Linux) Quanta is widely recognized as the most advanced free software web development environment. But a lot of people do not know that Quanta is a friendly editor for all XML documents. You can even import DTDs, write scripts to manage editor contents, visually create dialogs for your scripts and assign script actions to nearly any file operation in a project. Quanta is based on KDE and was released under GPL.

Some of Quanta’s features:

built-in FTP support
customizable syntax color-coding
support for Server Side Includes,
integration with Apache and the Terminal in OS X
Fully customizable Live previews
HTML validation
A Tag Clipboard
AppleScript support