An abundance of Web editors

Posted by admin at April 10, 2020

While any text editor, like NotePad or TextEdit, can be used to create Web pages, they don’t necessarily offer a lot of help towards that end. Other options offer more facilities for error checking, syntax coloring and saving some typing by filling things out for you.

One caveat, you need to make sure that whatever editor you choose will save to a “plain text” format (“.txt”). Some editors will save to other formats by default (.rtf, .doc, etc.) so you need to make sure you save your source code as plain text.

For my demos, I will be using a software program called Visual Studio Code (VS Code). You can download it for free, and for any operating system, here: https://code.visualstudio.com/

VS Code supports a large array of different Web technologies, but for this course we will be using it to develop our HTML and CSS. It also includes a feature called intellisense which you might have used in other code editors. It will suggest code for you to use, highlight keywords and a lot of other cool features you’ll see me use throughout the course.

Other than these two there are plenty of different programs you can use.

Here are a few possibilities:

• Notepad – on Windows PC’s
• Visual Studio – on Windows PC’s, many developers are already familiar with it
• XCode – Mac developers may be familiar with XCode
• TextEdit – This is available on Macs, but be sure you’re saving as plain text, not as a .rtf or .doc file.
• Sublime Text is quite popular with developers, though there can be a bit of a learning curve to use it’s many features.
• BlueGriffon is a WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) content editor for the World Wide Web. Powered by Gecko, the rendering engine of Firefox, it’s a modern and robust solution to edit Web pages in conformance to the latest Web Standards.
• Atom is another cross platform editor, created by GitHub.
• Vim or Emacs – Great editors on which the Web was built, but if you’re not already familiar with these, this isn’t the time to try.

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