What’s the Best Free Text Editor for Programming?
Notepad is a wonderful program (Notepad: The Best HTML Editor), but it just doesn’t cut it when you need to work with longer, more complicated code. So, I ask you: what’s your favorite free text editor?
Looking at Wikipedia’s List of Text Editors, I don’t know where to begin! The Comparison of Text Editors has lots of information, but being the newbie that I am, I don’t even know what to look for. What makes a good text editor?
A number of people shared their own recommendations for free HTML and CSS editors on Lifehacker, but hey, a few more opinions never hurt anyone. 
December 15th, 2006
I use HTML-Kit.
It’s way more powerful than I need it to be, but it makes doing the basics pretty easy.
December 17th, 2006
Yeah, that one sounded good to me. Thanks for the input!
December 22nd, 2006
I’ve been using “vi” for longer than I’d care to admit. On the plus side, it’s available on every platform, is quick, and once you learn the keystrokes, will never have to use a mouse when editing. The “vim” is a freeware variant with some added bells and whistles, including visual display of different html tags. On the minus side, it’s very old school.
Textedit was popular at Amazon because it had plugins for various programming languages, useful if you’re using a homegrown scripting blobule with javascript and html. Very powerful, multi-platform, but there was a small fee associated with it.
Firefox’s web developer plugin could be helpful.
December 22nd, 2006
Hello!
this is my favourite free text editor, it is very powerfull: it is lightweight, has tons of hightlighters, and many other interesting features: context.cx
December 23rd, 2006
Thanks, guys! I haven’t heard of those. I’ll have to take a look.
December 23rd, 2006
Hi
I agree with both Dana and Jim.
I’ve used HTMLKit for the past two years and found it to be an intuitive text editor and very versatile with the many plugins provided.
As Jim has said Vi is very old school in that it is a true text editor. With advent of Vim and especially Cream it has become much more intuitive. The learning curve is steep however and as Jim has stated it is very powerful!
For a learner, such as myself, HTMKit allowed me to design web pages very quickly while knowing little of HTML, CSS, JavaScript etc. However the more I learn about Vi the more exciting the possibilities become!
January 10th, 2007
I feel obliged to mention my favorite editor, even though it probably isn’t quite what you want. Emacs does beautiful color syntax highlighting, which is ideal for editing code of any kind (C, HTML, etc.). However, its learning curve is, well, daunting… worth the investment, but not exactly friendly to newcomers. (I still consider it more user-friendly than vi (sorry Jim and John!), but that may be because I learned emacs first and never quite got the hang of the completely different mindset required to operate vi.)
Good luck!
October 27th, 2008
emacs !
It’s extensible, and changes can be evaluated and appended to the config file really easily. You can set up macros, use regular expressions libraries… you can even compile source code within a separate buffer (if you have a good compiler like gcc set up by default within your OS. eg. linux).
Supports a bunch of different frames, views, etc. You can set up custom key-mapping to make it easier to work with common multibyte encoded characters.
It’s kinda perfect actually. It seemed kind of intimidating at first, but the documentation is amazing.
Just type the keychord:
C-h i for help. they have a tutorial built in (both for the editor itself and elisp as a language).
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
(It’s available for windows as well.)